[Fetchmail-devel] ANNOUNCE: fetchmail 6.4.5 is now available (regression fix for realpath for SUSv3/SUSv2 systems)

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

Greetings,

The 6.4.5 release of fetchmail is now available at the usual locations,
including <https://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/fetchmail/branch_6.4/>.

This fixes a regression on older operating systems that can print this error:
fetchmail: Cannot find absolute path for user's home directory

== NOTE ==
I intend this to be the last 6.4.x version with functional changes, and new
6.4.x are not planned, except if regressions, critical fixes, or new
translations or important documentation fixes appear and 6.5.0 is too far out.

Fetchmail 6.4.x is the last branch that will tolerate OpenSSL 1.0.2 and C89
compilers, and support Python 2.7.x (for newer x) for fetchmailconf.

== EXCURSION ---------
The direction for the near future is to do some bugfixing and possibly minor
features on the Git branch 'legacy_6x', for now called 6.5.0.dev*, it is a
branch that will require newer operating systems, toolchains, library, for
instance, OpenSSL 1.1.1 with TLSv1.3 support, C99 (for long long support) or
possibly C11 (TBD) and possibly newer IEEE Std 1003.1 compliance.
== END EXCURSION -----


The source archive is available in two formats at:
<https://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/fetchmail/branch_6.4/fetchmail-6.4.5.tar.xz>
<https://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/fetchmail/branch_6.4/fetchmail-6.4.5.tar.lz>

Detached GnuPG signatures for the respective tarballs are at:
<https://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/fetchmail/branch_6.4/fetchmail-6.4.5.tar.lz.asc>
<https://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/fetchmail/branch_6.4/fetchmail-6.4.5.tar.xz.asc>

SHA256 hash values:
SHA256(fetchmail-6.4.5.tar.lz)= 3325f468b821377069cd92089a559aa3a4a240621b01bf470646512d15440d88
SHA256(fetchmail-6.4.5.tar.xz)= d30f06920294490141ddcd4a66583bf16a0c88c1d7b4f58a3b9cef8511946b1c

Here are the release notes:

fetchmail-6.4.5 (released 2020-05-07, 27596 LoC):

## REGRESSION FIX:
* fetchmail 6.4.0 and 6.4.1 changed the resolution of the home directory
  in a way that requires SUSv4 semantics of realpath(), which leads to
  'Cannot find absolute path for... directory' error messages followed by aborts
  on systems where realpath() follows strict SUSv2 semantics and returns
  EINVAL if the 2nd argument is NULL.

  On such systems, for instance, Solaris 10, fetchmail requires PATH_MAX to be
  defined, and will then work again.  Regression reported by David Hough.

  On systems that neither provide auto-allocation semantics for realpath(),
  nor PATH_MAX, fetchmail will print this error and abort. Such systems
  are unsupported, see README.

## CHANGES:
* Add a test program fm_realpath, and a t.realpath script, neither to be
  installed. These will test resolution of the current working directory.

## TRANSLATION UPDATES in reverse alphabetical order of language codes,
## with my thanks to the translators:
* zh_CN: Boyuan Yang [Chinese (simplified)]
* sv:    Göran Uddeborg [Swedish]
* sq:    Besnik Bleta [Albanian]
* pl:    Jakub Bogusz [Polish]
* ja:    Takeshi Hamasaki [Japanese]
* fr:    Frédéric Marchal [French]
* cs:    Petr Pisar [Czech]

# KNOWN BUGS AND WORKAROUNDS
  (This section floats upwards through the NEWS file so it stays with the
  current release information)
* Fetchmail does not handle messages without Message-ID header well
  (See sourceforge.net bug #780933)
* Fetchmail currently uses 31-bit signed integers in several places
  where unsigned and/or wider types should have been used, for instance,
  for mailbox sizes, and misreports sizes of 2 GibiB and beyond. 
  Fixing this requires C89 compatibility to be relinquished.
* BSMTP is mostly untested and errors can cause corrupt output.
* Fetchmail does not track pending deletes across crashes.
* The command line interface is sometimes a bit stubborn, for instance,
  fetchmail -s doesn't work with a daemon running.
* Linux systems may return duplicates of an IP address in some circumstances if
  no or no global IPv6 addresses are configured.
  (No workaround. Ubuntu Bug#582585, Novell Bug#606980.)
* Kerberos 5 may be broken, particularly on Heimdal, and provide bogus error
  messages. This will not be fixed, because the maintainer has no Kerberos 5
  server to test against. Use GSSAPI.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Happy fetches,
Matthias