[fetchmail-devel] user help needed: please test fetchmail 6.2.6.alpha1 snapshot

[Matthias A. <mat...@gm...>]

Greetings,

a long time ago, Eric S. Raymond released fetchmail 6.2.5. It was
decided that the code was handed to new maintainers, but the handover
didn't really improve the maintenance situation - it turned out that the
new maintainers had only a little more time than ESR.

We have tried to move development to BerliOS to make the development
process more visible, but figured that BerliOS's SVN was instable at the
time, so we moved the repository again - the new one is stable, and my
thanks to Graham Wilson for arranging for the new repo.

At any rate, some work has taken place though in spite of all
difficulties; over two dozen bugfixes were made, and several other
changes. Details below.

We know many users appreciate fetchnews, and now it's your chance to
help the fetchmail project, by testing the current code, so we can know
the next release will be good.

I have rolled a snapshot of the current SVN repository contents into a
tarball, with the preliminary version tag 6.2.6.alpha1. Download from:
<http://home.pages.de/~mandree/fetchmail/fetchmail-6.2.6.alpha1.tar.bz2>.

Users who can afford to run a test version of the code, or are annoyed
by a particular 6.2.5 bug, are asked to test the code and see if their
favorite 6.2.5 bugs are really gone from the alpha version, or if new
bugs have appeared, and report problems, important bugs that remain AND
are easy to fix to the lists. It is important that you drop a line even
if you found that the alpha version worked well, otherwise we don't know
that the alpha version has been tested and found to be no worse than
6.2.5 - which is all we're after.

Note that the current alpha is mostly untested, so run this on test
machines first before putting into production. This comes, as usual,
without any guarantees.

User feedback on the alpha or upcoming beta versions is an absolute
requirement before we can move forward to a new stable release.

The changes since 6.2.5 are as follows (taken from the NEWS file):
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Developer who merged or committed the patch in parentheses.

* Sunil Shetye's fix to force fetchsizelimit to 1 for APOP and RPOP.
* PopDel.py removed from contrib at author's request.
* Matthias Andree's fix for Sunil Shetye's fetch-split patch
* Include James Stone's moldremover.py script.
* Enable .fetchmailrc permissions checking under Cygwin.
* Nalin Dahyabai's fix for POP3 strong authentication.
* Revised Nalin Dahyabai's fix for POP3 strong authentication (Matthias
  Andree, the original version would go into an infinite loop when CAPA
  failed; found by David Greaves.)
* HOME_ETC patch for PLD Linux.
* Sunil Shetye's fix for SSL configuration.
* Simon Josefsson's patch for GSS library support.
* Added Andrey Lelikov's recupe for Hotmail and Lycos Webmail.
* Remove blank between MAIL FROM: and <, which causes Cyrus to complain.
  Patch by Phil Endecott. (Rob Funk)
* Switched to automake. (Matthias Andree)
* Build fixes for HESIOD and resolv.h trouble on FreeBSD. (Matthias Andree)
* Fabrice Bellet's fix for Red Hat bug #113492, fetchmail hangs in IMAP
  mode after EXPUNGE when the server (Dovecot 0.99.10) doesn't update
  RECENT and EXISTS counts. (Matthias Andree)
* Holger Mauermann's bounce patch, to use a NULL envelope from, not
  write a Return-Path header (both to meet RFC-2821), changed From,
  added Subject header, rewording the human readable part. (Matthias Andree)
* Merge Sunil Shetye's time.h handling fix. (Matthias Andree)
* Merge Gerd von Egidy's patch to avoid a segfault in multidrop/received
  mode when the Received: headers are malformatted. (Matthias Andree)
* MIME-encode bodies and Subject headers of warning messages (Matthias
  Andree), limiting the header to 7 bits.
* Normalize most locale codesets to IANA codesets, based on
  norm_charmap.c by Markus Kuhn. (Matthias Andree)
* Remove sleep(3) after POP3 login, patch by Brian Candler. (Matthias
  Andree)
* Fix option parsing bug that trashes the showdots setting when more
  than one server is configured. Patch by Brian Candler. (Matthias
  Andree)
* Honor sslcertpath setting even if sslcertck is unset. Patch by Brian
  Candler. (Matthias Andree)
* SSL certificate checking fixes, don't display same error message twice
  in succession, make sure that Common Name and fingerprint checking are
  only done once. Print all validation warnings/errors even if not in
  verbose mode. Patch by Brian Candler. (Matthias Andree)
* Import Bjorn Reese and Daniel Stenberg's MIT-licensed Trio 1.10 from
  http://daniel.haxx.se/projects/trio/ for systems that do not support
  snprintf or vsnprintf. (Matthias Andree)
* Clean up the horrible #ifdef HAVE_[V]SNPRINTF that made the code
  unreadable. Use Trio where [v]snprintf is/are missing. (Matthias Andree)
* Default to Linux 2.2 /proc/net/dev format, and use uname(2) to determine the
  kernel version instead of calling uname(1). Thanks to Paul Slootman.
  (Matthias Andree)
* Be more careful when swapping UID lists or writing the .fetchids file,
  requested by Manfred Weihs. (Matthias Andree)
* Print a warning if multidrop configuration is attempted without
  envelope option. (Matthias Andree)
* Split information on fetchmail versions before 6.0.0 to a separate
  OLDNEWS file. (Matthias Andree)
* Merge SuSE patches: (sent by Stanislav Brabec, merged by Matthias Andree)
  - fetchmail-6.2.5-declaration.patch (double sigint_handler decl/getpass.c)
  - fetchmail-6.2.5-implicit-declaration.patch (missing #include)
  - fetchmail-6.2.5-random-result.patch (uninitialized variable/opie.c)
* Revised some bogus assertions about POP3 LAST and UIDL use in the
  manual page. UIDL isn't flaky as the man page suggested, but a
  reliability feature. In fact, IMAP4 code is flaky in that it relies on
  the upstream seen flags. (Matthias Andree)
* Miloslav Trmac's patch for fetchmailconf to support string-type values
  of the "port" variable, avoiding "port None" corruption in .fetchmailrc.
  To fix Redhat Bug #55623 (Matthias Andree)
* de.po fixes from Nico Golde (Matthias Andree)
* es.po fixes from Jesus Roncero, Debian bug #286044 (Matthias Andree)
* sink.c fix from Cesar Eduardo Barros, to avoid double @ in address
  when username contains an @ and the envelope sender is null, Debian
  bug #272289 (Matthias Andree)
----------------------------------------------------------------------------

-- 
Matthias Andree