Draft of INN 2.5.0-BETA announcement

[Julien ÉLIE]

Hi,

Here is a suggestion for the announcement of the first BETA version
of INN 2.5.0.  (Unless you prefer to call it the first Release Candidate??)

Of course, any comment is greatly welcome!
Mistakes, something to add/change...  Do not hesitate to add important
stuff I could have forgotten or I am not aware of (I do not know much
about improvements done in 2.5 regarding storage and history).

And do you see other things to check during the upgrade 2.4 -> 2.5?


I believe we could send that announce the following week, when INN 2.4.6
is released.


-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Subject: [ANNOUNCE] INN 2.5.0-BETA available

Internet Systems Consortium is pleased to announce that a BETA version
of a new major release of INN is available at:

    [...]

The MD5 checksum of this BETA release is:

    [...]

A PGP signature is available in the same directory.  Due to the extensive
changes between INN 2.4 and INN 2.5, no patch is available.

INN 2.5.0 is almost entirely compatible with INN 2.4, and most INN 2.4
users will be able to upgrade with a simple "make update".  A few checks
explained in the upgrade changes below should also be made.

All of the applicable bug fixes from the INN 2.4 STABLE series are also
included in INN 2.5.



Upgrading from 2.4 to 2.5

    The following upgrade process is still under construction and not
    complete.  There may be additional things to watch out for not listed
    here; if you run across any, please let <inn-workers at lists.isc.org> know
    about them.

    The following changes require your full attention because a manual
    intervention may be needed:

    * In order to process control messages, owing to the new
      application/news-groupinfo entity described in USEPRO, controlchan
      needs the "MIME::Parser" module.  It is available from CPAN
      ("MIME-tools" in modules/by-module/MIME/, for instance on
      ftp.perl.org).  You can also use the one provided with your
      distribution, has it already been packaged for it.  A version of Perl
      superior to 5.8.0 is recommended with INN.

    * A new control.ctl.local file has been added in *pathetc*.  It is used
      by controlchan and allows to specify local rules against control
      messages without having to modify control.ctl.  It also contains the
      encodings to use for the newsgroups file (by default, UTF-8 will be
      used for the descriptions of the newsgroups).

      You should use that new file and, at the same time, update your
      control.ctl and moderators files.

    * The innreport configuration file has slightly changed.  The new
      innreport.conf file shipped with INN should be used and your possible
      changes backported to this new version.  Alexander Bartolich has
      greatly improved innreport and especially its XHTML output (a XSL
      transformation is also provided, if needed, in innreport-filter.xslt,
      in the contrib directory).

    * The $SPOOLBASE variable has been renamed to $SPOOLDIR in innshellvars
      in order to be more consistent.  It impacts shell scripts only.  If
      you import innshellvars and use that variable in your scripts, you
      will have to rename it.

    The legacy innshellvars.pl script has been replaced with a real INN Perl
    module "INN::Config" for Perl programs.  The location of Perl modules
    can be set with the --with-libperl-dir option to "configure".  All Perl
    scripts shipped with INN have been converted to use that module.  You
    may want to consider using "INN::Config" in your Perl scripts, though
    innshellvars.pl is still provided with INN.

    The parameters used by nnrpd to provide TLS support are now *tlscafile*,
    *tlscapath*, *tlscertfile* and *tlskeyfile* in inn.conf.  The sasl.conf
    file used for that in previous versions of INN is obsolete.  innupgrade
    takes care of the change during "make update".

    The *nntpactsync* parameter has been renamed to *incominglogfrequency*
    in inn.conf; innupgrade handles this renaming during the update.

    inndstart and startinnfeed are no longer part of INN and are no longer
    used.  Instead, a separate setuid root helper program written by Russ
    Allbery is used to bind to the news ports (and does only that), and is
    run by innd and nnrpd when necessary.  This means that INN may not be
    able to increase file descriptor limits for itself the way that it could
    before.  If you get error messages about resetting the file descriptor
    limits, you may need to increase the file descriptor limits as root
    before running rc.news as the news user.  See the sample init script in
    contrib for an example of how to do this.  More information on file
    descriptor limits can be found in INSTALL.

    In newsfeeds, innfeed should be run directly rather than through
    startinnfeed.  innupgrade will attempt to take care of this modification
    during "make update".  When starting innd by hand, innd can just be run
    directly rather than using inndstart.

    Support for Berkeley DB versions prior to 4.3 has been dropped.  You
    will have to use at least Berkeley DB 4.4; the recommended version is
    4.7.

    If you are upgrading from a version prior to INN 2.4, see also
    "Upgrading from 2.3 to 2.4".



Major changes from 2.4 to 2.5

    * Ken Murchison has contributed SASL authentication support for nnrpd,
      implementing the AUTHINFO SASL section of RFC 4643.  If the
      --with-sasl option is given to "configure", nnrpd will be able to
      authenticate clients via secure SASL mechanisms.

    * Julien Elie has implemented in nnrpd the new version of the NNTP
      protocol described in RFC 3977, RFC 4642 and RFC 4643.  Consequently,
      nnrpd now recognizes the CAPABILITIES command, the HDR and LIST
      HEADERS commands, the second optional argument to specify a range of
      articles to LISTGROUP, the OVER command, as well as the ":bytes" and
      ":lines" metadata items.

    * Heath Kehoe has added the ability to compress overview data before it
      is stored in ovdb.  It significantly improves the performance of this
      storage method and reduces the time spent by expireover.  See the new
      --with-zlib option to "configure" and the ovdb(5) man page.

    * INN now uses autoconf 2.59 or later for configuration.  As a result,
      some "configure" options have changed slightly and more of the
      standard --*dir options should be supported in lieu of the old
      INN-specific options.  See "configure --help" for the available
      options.

    * Thanks to Kirill Berezin, the buffindexed overview method now supports
      buffers larger than 2 GB.  It is not necessary to compile INN with
      large file support to use such large buffers with buffindexed.
      Buffindexed is now also more robust with mmaped files.

    * tinyleaf, a miniature IHAVE-only leaf server written by Russ Allbery,
      is now included.  See the tinyleaf(8) man page for more information.

    * The Perl and Python *filter_mode* hooks are now called when innd is
      shutting down via either "ctlinnd shutdown" or "ctlinnd xexec" with a
      new mode value of "shutdown".  This will allow the Perl hooks to save
      filter data across innd restarts without requiring that the news
      administrator throttle the server first.  (Python already had a
      separate close hook that is also called.)

    * Support for embedded Tcl filters in innd has been removed.  It hasn't
      worked for some time and causes innd crashes if compiled in (even if
      not used).  If someone wants to step forward and maintain it, we
      recommend starting from scratch and emulating the Perl and Python
      filters.

    * If *strippath* is set in readers.conf, the whole user-supplied Path:
      header will now be stripped.  Previously, the final component of the
      user-supplied Path: would still be retained.

    * news2mail can now set the envelope-from address of the mails it sends.
      A third optional part in news2mail.cf entries has been added by
      D. Stussy to achieve that.

    * The -g option to nnrpd is no longer supported.  If you are verifying
      passwords against the system password database, see the ckpasswd(8)
      man page, and in particular the -s option.  (A much better idea would
      be to just use PAM, which ckpasswd supports.)

    * Support for bzip2-compressed batches (with bunbatch) has been added.

    * Support for *runasuser* and *runasgroup* parameters in inn.conf allows
      to set the news user and the news group under which the news server
      runs.  Thanks to Ivan Shmakov for this feature.

      New other options have been added to configuration files:  *ignore* in
      incoming.conf, *logstats* and *nnrpdflags* in inn.conf, and
      *log-time-format* in innfeed.conf.

      The --with-http-dir option has also been added to "configure" so as to
      set *pathhttp* in inn.conf.

    * A lot of work has been done on documentation:  improvements of
      existing one, writing new one and proof-reading.  Samples are also
      more detailed.

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Finished!  :)

-- 
Julien ÉLIE

« I had some words with my wife, and she had
  some paragraphs with me. » (Sigmund Freud)