INN 2.7.4 release candidate

[Julien ÉLIE]

Hi all,

A release candidate for INN 2.7.4 can be downloaded at:

     https://github.com/InterNetNews/inn/releases/tag/2.7.4rc1

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

As it has been the case since the release process of INN 2.7.1 in 2023, 
we no longer use the "testing" repository on ftp.isc.org.


The final 2.7.4 release is scheduled by the end of this month (June). 
Feel free to test this release candidate and report any issue you may 
encounter.


Changes from 2.7.3 to 2.7.4rc1

     * The speed of expireover has been greatly improved by the
       implementation of a Bloom filter (a probabilistic data structure used
       to efficiently test whether an element is a member of a set, without
       any false negative).  Instead of checking every article in the
       overview database against the history file to detect orphaned 
entries,
       expireover now sequentially reads the history file at startup to 
build
       a Bloom filter, and makes its checks in that optimized data 
structure.
       On large news spools of billions of articles, expireover could take
       several weeks to complete; it now runs in a few minutes!  This 
feature
       is activated by default and controlled by the new *expirebloomfp*
       parameter in inn.conf.  Many thanks to Kevin Bowling for this
       improvement.

     * The speed of expire has also been drastically improved for large news
       spools thanks to the recording of every cancellation alongside the
       existing storage and overview deletions, so that expire can just drop
       matching history entries without doing per-article retrieval system
       calls, thus saving a good amount of time at billion-article scale.
       This feature contributed by Kevin Bowling is not enabled by default.
       See the documentation of *expiretombstone* in inn.conf for more
       details, as well as *nnrpdcheckart* which also makes use of the 
cancel
       tombstone log file.

     * Added four new parameters to ovsqlite.conf for the ovsqlite overview
       method: *mmapsize* to have SQLite read data via mmap instead of
       copying into its own page cache, *readercachesize* to set the SQLite
       in-memory page cache size for each nnrpd reader process, *walmode* to
       enable SQLite's Write-Ahead Logging journal mode and improve read
       performance when multiple nnrpd processes access the overview 
database
       simultaneously, and *walcheckpointthreshold* to parameterize when to
       perform checkpoints.  See the ovsqlite(5) manual page for more
       details.  Thanks to Kevin Bowling for all these enhancements!

     * When *laxmid* is set in the *syntaxchecks* parameter in inn.conf,
       Message-IDs without any "@" character are now accepted by innd.

     * Fixed very infrequent errors of memory mapping when updating the
       active file or using the tradindexed overview method, as well as when
       updating the history file with *nfswriter* set to true.  Thanks to
       Chris Knipe for the bug report and to Richard Kettlewell for the
       patch.

     * Fixed the rotation of the perl-nocem.log file generated when 
syslog is
       not available or the -l flag used with perl-nocem: the contents of
       this log file was mistakenly appended to news.notice by scanlogs.

     * Fixed makehistory so that malformed input does not insert a bogus
       overview entry.  Thanks to Kevin Bowling for the patch.

     * Following upstream rename from blacklist to blocklist, the
       --with-blacklist configure flag is renamed --with-blocklist for
       blocklistd support in FreeBSD 15 and NetBSD 10.  For backward
       compatibility, both blacklist and blocklist libraries will be 
searched
       by the new --with-blocklist flag.  Thanks to Jose Luis Duran for the
       information.

     * Added support for the ALPN TLS extension in nnrpd.  Thanks to Roman
       Donchenko for this feature.

     * Various other minor bug fixes and documentation improvements.


-- 
Julien ÉLIE

« Sur vingt personnes qui parlent de nous, dix-neuf en disent du mal et
   la vingtième, qui en dit du bien, le dit mal. » (Rivarol)