InterNetNews/inn 2.4.2

INN 2.4.2

on GitHub

2004-12-21
Full changes and diff from previous release

Highlights

• INN is now licensed under a less restrictive license (about as minimally restrictive as possible shy of public domain), and the clause similar to the old BSD advertising clause has been dropped.

• The embedded Tcl filter code has been disabled (and will be removed entirely in the next major release of INN). 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, I recommend starting from scratch and emulating the Perl and Python filters.

Bug Fixes

• ctlinnd should now successfully handle messages from INN up to the maximum allowable packet size in the protocol, fixing problems sites with many active peers were having with innstat output.

• Overview generation has been fixed in both makehistory and innd to follow the rules in the latest NNTP draft rather than just replacing special characters with spaces. This means that the unfolding of folded header fields will not introduce additional, incorrect whitespace in the overview data.

• nnrpd now uniformly responds with a 480 or 502 status code to attempts to read a newsgroup to which the user does not have access, depending on whether the user has authenticated. Previously, it returned a 411 status code, claiming the group didn't exist, which confuses the reactive authentication capability of news readers.

• If a user is not authorized to approve articles (using the A access control in readers.conf), articles that include an Approved header field will be rejected even if posted to unmoderated groups. Some other site may consider that group to be moderated.

• The configuration parser used for readers.conf and others now correctly handles # inside quoted strings and is more robust against unmatched double quotes.

• Messages mailed to moderators had two spaces after the colons in the header fields, rather than one. This bug has been fixed.

• A bug that could cause heap corruption and random crashes in innd if INN were compiled with Python support has been fixed.

• Some problems with innd's tracking of article size and enforcement of the configured maximum article size have been fixed.

• INN's code should now be more 64-bit clean in its handling of size_t, pointer differences, and casting of pointers, correcting problems that showed up on 64-bit platforms like AMD64.

• Many other, more minor bugs have also been fixed.

New Features

• make install and make update now always install the newly built binaries, rather than only installing them if the modification times are newer. This is the behavior that people expect. make install now also automatically builds a new (empty) history database if one doesn't already exist.

• pgpverify will now correctly verify signatures generated by GnuPG and better supports GnuPG as the PGP implementation.

• Improved the error reporting in the history database code, in inews, in controlchan, and in expire.