INN 2.7.1 release candidate

Julien ÉLIE julien at trigofacile.com
Wed Mar 22 20:53:22 UTC 2023


Hi all,

A release candidate for INN 2.7.1 can be downloaded at:

     https://github.com/InterNetNews/inn/releases/tag/2.7.1rc1

The tarball is attached as an asset at the end of the page.


Now we're using GitHub, we can modernize a bit our release process. 
Russ and I propose that we no longer use the "testing" repository on 
ftp.isc.org, nor provide checksums (we provided 4 checksums for a final 
release! -- md5, sha1, sha256 and sha512), nor provide a diff from the 
previous release.

These elements correspond to what can be found here for this rc1:

     https://ftp.isc.org/isc/inn/testing/

(Note that the rc1 testing tarball in ftp.isc.org is 3 days older than 
the one in GitHub I generated a few minutes ago because I needed a 
dedicated Git tag to generate a "prerelease" in GitHub, and therefore 
regenerated the tarball.)

It will be the last time we use the "testing" directory, which will be 
removed when doing the final 2.7.1 release.

Naturally, final releases will still also be made available in ftp.isc.org:

     https://ftp.isc.org/isc/inn/

but with only the PGP signature of the tarball.


In the GitHub release page, you'll find all that stuff (and even more). 
You can obtain a diff from the previous release or from any other Git 
tag, you can check that the signed release tag is "verified", you can 
read the release announcement, and you can download the tarball.  (For a 
final release, the PGP-signed tarball will also be attached as an asset.)


Any worries about that change proposal in the release process?



The final release is scheduled next month (mid April) if there aren't
any reported issues.

Feel free to test this release candidate and report any issue you may 
encounter.


Changes from 2.6.5 to 2.7.0

     * Added a new *groupexactcount* parameter in readers.conf to force 
nnrpd
       to report the exact number of still existing articles in newsgroups
       instead of an estimated count.  When the estimated number of articles
       is strictly below *groupexactcount* (set to 5 by default), nnrpd now
       recounts them and reports the actual value (articles that have been
       cancelled or overwritten in self-expiring CNFS buffers may otherwise
       still be counted in the estimate).  News clients will then be 
directly
       aware of empty newsgroups; they would otherwise have tried to 
retrieve
       possible articles, to finally not show anything to the user.

     * Programs sending mails now include, when appropriate, an
       Auto-Submitted header field in the message headers (either set to
       "auto-generated" or "auto-replied", following the recommendation in
       RFC 3834).  Thanks to Harald Dunkel for this suggestion which 
will for
       instance help to avoid unnecessary vacation replies.

     * Added a new -a option to innmail to specify additional header fields
       to add in the headers of messages.  This is notably used to 
internally
       support the addition of the Auto-Submitted header field in outgoing
       mails.

     * Added new ovsqlite-util program to perform some basic consistency
       checks and dump operations on an overview database using the ovsqlite
       method.  More checks and features will be added in future releases.
       You'll need the "DBI" Perl module with the "DBD::SQLite" driver
       installed on your system to use this program.

     * Added TLS support in pullnews for connections to upstream servers
       configured in pullnews.marks, and to the downstream server in the
       existing -s flag.  A port can now also be specified for 
connections to
       upstream servers (it was already possible for the downstream server
       only).

     * Added a new -L option to pullnews to specify the largest wanted
       article size in bytes.  Articles whose size exceeds that value 
will no
       longer be downloaded by pullnews.

     * pullnews now detects a socket timeout while downloading articles from
       a remote peer.  The download gracefully stops, and another 
attempt can
       be automatically made according to the setting given with the -t 
flag.
       Thanks to Jesse Rehmer for the bug report.

     * Fixed the generation and the handling of storage tokens on wrapped
       CNFS buffers, thanks to bug reports from Kamil Jonca:

       * Duplicate entries were returned by makehistory on fully wrapped
         cyclic buffers (the first article of the cyclic buffer appeared
         twice in the output).

       * The first article of a fully wrapped cyclic buffer was removed too
         soon from history (expire wrongly thought its storage token was no
         longer existing after a wrap).

       * The first article of the previous cycle number of a cyclic buffer
         containing articles from two different cycle numbers was wrongly
         considered by makehistory to belong to the current cycle number.

     * innd no longer dies when a newsfeeds entry has an unexpected trailing
       whitespace.

     * The size of duplicated articles was counted twice in totals, average
       article sizes and graphs by innreport, when parsing innd 
checkpoints.
       Thanks to Hauke Lampe for the patch to count it only once.

     * Customizing the domain part of Message-IDs generated by nnrpd and the
       server name indicated in Injection-Info header fields is now easier:
       the *domain* parameter in the access blocks of readers.conf can be
       directly used (without needing to set *virtualhost* as it was
       previously the case).

     * If the *domain* parameter is set in inn.conf or in a readers.conf
       access block, and has invalid characters, or if the fully qualified
       domain name (FQDN) of the news server has invalid characters when
       *domain* is unset, a fatal error is now reported at startup.  It is a
       basic configuration error which otherwise leads to the generation of
       invalid article Message-IDs.

     * Improved the speed of article searches with HDR, LAST, NEXT, and XPAT
       commands when there is a (huge) gap in article numbers.  On 
newsgroups
       with several millions of consecutive missing articles (which is a 
rare
       situation), these commands could take several seconds to run.

     * Incoming articles in newsgroups that have exceeded the maximum number
       of articles they can contain (2^31-1) are now correctly rejected. 
  INN
       was otherwise happily accepting them but either numbers returned in
       NNTP responses were not right, or some news clients choked when
       receiving unexpected large article numbers.  (The current version of
       the NNTP protocol only allows article numbers up to 2^31-1.)

     * Fixed the renumbering of reported low water marks for empty 
newsgroups
       in active after overview expiration, when using the ovsqlite method.
       They were set to 1 for empty newsgroups whereas they were not 
supposed
       to decrease.  (These reported low water marks regained their expected
       values during the next overview expiration, provided that the
       newsgroup was no longer empty.)

     * The reported high water mark of empty newsgroups is now correctly set
       to one less than the reported low water mark in overview data.
       (Previously, the reported low water mark was set to one more than the
       reported high water mark.)

     * Fixed the output of the "ctlinnd feedinfo ''" command that was
       returning information only for the first site, and the output of the
       "ctlinnd name channel" command that was returning partial information
       for the requested channel.

     * The build of external programs which include inn/storage.h was 
failing
       because of the unexpected inclusion of config.h in one of the 
included
       headers.  Also, a few Autoconf results were not correctly made
       available to external programs.  This is now fixed.

     * Fixed the build on systems whose default shell does not completely
       meet the Posix standard.  A few build scripts were run with the
       default shell instead of the one found by Autoconf and afterwards 
used
       for INN.

     * Use standard daemon(3) C function, when available, to daemonize innd,
       nnrpd, ovdb_server and ovsqlite-server instead of an INN-specific
       function.




-- 
Julien ÉLIE

« Ta remise sur pied lui a fait perdre la tête ! » (Astérix)


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