Towards INN 2.5.4

[Julien ÉLIE]

Hi all,

Several improvements have been made since the last release of INN (2.5.3).
Maybe it now is time to schedule the release of INN 2.5.4!  Before the end
of the year is probably feasible.

If somebody has or knows of pending patches that would be worthwhile
integrating into the 2.5.4 release, please tell us.  And if you are
currently experiencing bugs with INN 2.5.3, please also respond
to this mail.


Before the 2.5.4 release, I have scheduled to look at:
- adding new functions to pullnews.  Geraint Edwards provided me with
a patch involving:
        - adding a header-only feed option -B,
	- adding a hashfeed option -a,
	- improving -m to allow regex filter on headers,
	- improving rnews-related logging;

- adding support of "Name <address>" forms of GnuPG UIDs and also
several UIDs on the same key to pgpverify.  It will then allow
control messages for the grisbi.* and fido.ger.* hierarchy to be
processed by controlchan (they are currently all discarded).  At the
same time, we can fix the warning reported by Jochen in the POD
documentation of pgpverify;

- dealing with samples for motd that should not be installed by default
and served with unconfigured INN;

- improving some parts of our documentation according to previous
exchanges we had on this mailing-list and news.software.nntp (I flagged
the relevant threads).



For your information, current effective changes in 2.5.4 are:

    * As the name of the radius.conf configuration file shipped with INN for
      the nnrpd authenticator against a RADIUS server conflicts with the
      libradius package, this file is renamed to inn-radius.conf (innupgrade
      takes care of the rename during the update).

    * The attributes hash is now accessible to nnrpd Perl posting filter.
      As a result, filter_nnrpd.pl can make use of it.  Only authentication
      and access Perl hooks could previously use the attributes hash.
      Thanks to Steve Crook for this addition.

    * INN now properly builds fine with flex 2.5.36 (this version introduced
      a change of type for a variable used by INN).

    * When using funnel feeds, innfeed log files were open forever, which
      resulted in empty log files, once rotated by scanlogs.  innfeed now
      reopens its log files upon receiving a HUP signal; this signal is in
      particular sent by scanlogs during log rotation.  Thanks to Florian
      Schlichting for the patch.

    * Exploder and process channels are now reopened when "ctlinnd
      flushlogs" is used.  Otherwise, they could hold open an already
      deleted errlog file.  The issue affected in particular controlchan or
      ninpaths, running as such channels.

    * Fixed a buffer overflow when using imapfeed with more than a million
      commands during the same IMAP session.  Thanks to David Binderman for
      the bug report.

    * Fixed a regression that occurred in INN 2.5.3 regarding the path used
      by default by pullnews for its configuration file.  Instead of looking
      in the running user's home directory, it was looking in the *pathnews*
      directory parametered in inn.conf.  Thanks to Tony Evans for the bug
      report.

    * ckpasswd no longer tries to use the ndbm compatibility layer provided
      by Berkeley DB if Berkeley DB has been built without ndbm support.
      Also add support for gdbm libraries in ckpasswd.

    * Fixed a Perl warning in inncheck; using "defined(@array)" has been
      deprecated since Perl 5.16.

    * Fixed the occurrence of an unexpected "cant select" error generated by
      innd.  Thanks to Paul Tomblin for having caught that long-standing
      issue.

    * When building INN with Berkeley DB support, no longer add -L/usr/lib
      to the linker include flags; unconditionally adding it may break the
      build on systems using lib32 and lib64 directories.




After the release of INN 2.5.4, maybe we should work on the release of
a new major version of INN (2.6.0), probably along with a latest (2.5.5)
version in the 2.5 branch.

-- 
Julien ÉLIE

« – Nous parlerons quand l'interprète dormira. [Bong !]
  – Il dort. On peut parler. » (Astérix)