INN 2.7.2 release candidate

[Julien ÉLIE]

Hi all,

A release candidate for INN 2.7.2 can be downloaded at:

     https://github.com/InterNetNews/inn/releases/tag/2.7.2rc1

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

As it has been the case since the last 2.7.1 release process, we no longer use the "testing" repository on ftp.isc.org.


The final 2.7.2 release is scheduled next month (mid June).  Feel free to test this release candidate and report any issue you may encounter.


Changes from 2.7.1 to 2.7.2rc1

     * Up-to-date control.ctl and nocem.ctl files are provided with this
       release.  You may want to manually update your configuration with the
       new information recorded about hierarchies and NoCeM issuers, and make
       sure the relevant PGP keys are installed on your system.

     * Added a new *ovflushcount* parameter in inn.conf, defaulting to 50, to
       parameterize the number of articles received between flushing their
       overview data to disk, when using the buffindexed overview storage
       method.  (In previous releases, that number was ten times the value of
       *icdsynccount*, but a dedicated parameter is better.)

     * Added the "INN::ovsqlite_client" Perl module to access an ovsqlite
       overview database through ovsqlite-server from a Perl script.  This
       module provides search, add, remove and expire functions for
       information stored in an ovsqlite database (newsgroups and overview
       data associated to articles in these newsgroups).  Many thanks to Bo
       Lindbergh for it, as well as for two samples in the contrib directory
       (ovsqlite-dump and ovsqlite-undump) showing how to use the module.

     * Added two new options in storage.conf, contributed by Christoph Biedl:

       * a *filtered* option to store articles which have been rejected by a
         Perl or Python filter for innd into a separate storage class, when
         *dontrejectfiltered* is set to true in inn.conf;

       * a *path* option to store articles by the contents of the Path header
         field, notably to isolate the storage of spammy sites from other
         sites.

     * The delayer program, which previously was in the contrib directory, is
       now installed by default.  It notably permits generating a delayed
       feed, for instance to give cancel control articles and NoCeM messages
       time to arrive, and therefore actually cancel articles before they are
       locally stored.  Thanks to Christoph Biedl for the documentation,
       testing, and addition of several useful flags to delayer.

     * innreport now supports high-precision timestamps like
       "2023-07-29T04:15:01.889064+02:00" that syslog can be parameterized to
       use; daily Usenet reports otherwise indicated all these logs as
       unknown entries because a format like "Jul 29 04:15:01" was expected.

     * innreport now alphabetically sorts lines which have the same rank
       instead of displaying them in random order.

     * scanspool now detects empty files in a tradspool news spool and
       directories with an all-digit component (which may conflict with a
       possible file with the same name), correctly parses continuation lines
       in header fields, and can automatically remove articles reported to
       have a problem (when run with the new -r flag).

     * Added several new options to better parameterize perl-nocem.  The
       location of its configuration file, the keyring to use, and the full
       gpg and gpgv commands to run can now be modified by flags passed to
       the program.  Unprocessed NoCeM notices will also show up in daily
       Usenet reports generated by innreport.  Log verbosity can be
       controlled, cancelled articles can be backed up into files, and
       perl-nocem can write logs to a separate perl-nocem.log file.  Local
       rules to fine-tune within a NoCeM notice which articles get cancelled
       can also be applied.  See its manual page for more information about
       the use of these options.

     * perl-nocem now correctly parses the identifiers of NoCeM issuers with
       special characters like "+" in the configuration file.

     * Fixed a hang when posting articles if COMPRESS DEFLATE is active but
       TLS is not.  Thanks to Enrik Berkhan for the patch for nnrpd.

     * innd no longer dies when "ctlinnd trace" is run on an invalid channel.

     * INN now properly handles header field names starting with a leading
       dot: innd accurately computes the ":bytes" metadata item of articles
       with such header field names, and nnrpd correctly preserves the
       leading initial dot at injection time and rightly parses such header
       field names in HDR, XHDR and XPAT commands.

     * nnrpd now rejects articles with invalid dot-stuffing (that is to say
       when a dot at the beginning of a line is not doubled) as it is a
       violation of the NNTP protocol.  (innd still goes on accepting and
       propagating such articles as they have already been injected and
       propagated.)

     * Fixed the computation of the Bytes header field by pullnews (in
       header-only mode with the -B flag).

     * Fixed the generation of rnews batches by pullnews (when using the -r
       flag) which had not the expected native LF line termination.

     * Fixed inndf on 32-bit architectures with large file support
       (previously, inndf could not count more than 2^32 bytes or inodes on
       these architectures).

     * Fixed an issue preventing articles from expiring when using the
       ovsqlite method, in a very rare case.  When an article had more than
       100,000 bytes of overview data (for instance with a Subject header
       field of that length), overview expiration was no longer done for
       newsgroups carrying this article.  Such articles, which most certainly
       are spams anyway, are no longer added to the ovsqlite database.
       Thanks for Jesse Rehmer for the bug report.

     * Fixed a database lock issue when running ovsqlite-util on a running
       server with the *transtimelimit* parameter in ovsqlite.conf set to a
       higher value than the default busy timeout of 30 seconds of
       ovsqlite-util.  Thanks to Jesse Rehmer for the bug report and Bo
       Lindbergh for the fix.

     * innd no longer malfunctions nor throttles when the maximum number of
       file descriptors supported by the system is reached.  If needing to
       use more file descriptors than the default system limit, a new
       "LARGE_FD_SETSIZE" option can be set at build time.  See the
       documentation for *rlimitnofile* in inn.conf for more information.
       Thanks to Jesse Rehmer for the bug report.


-- 
Julien ÉLIE

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