[Botan-announce] Botan 1.2.1

[Jack L. <ll...@ac...>]

Botan 1.2.1 was released today. This release is primarily intended to let Botan
build out of the box on Windows systems, particularly those using Visual C++ 7.
The configure.pl script now runs on Windows, and the VC7 makefiles it generates
work significantly better. There is a section of the documentation telling you
all of the details, called "Building The Library (MS Windows)". The Windows
build procedure has been tested using Visual C++ 7 on Windows 2000.

The procedure is basically as follows:

 >perl configure.pl msvc-windows-<whatever> --modules=es_capi
 >nmake check

For my builds, I used ActiveState Perl 5.8.0, but 5.6.1 or 5.005 should
also work fine. Please let me know if any kind of problems building Botan
on Windows show up, since (AFAIK) they are all fixed as of 1.2.1.

The only new features in this release are the addition of a CBC padding
mechanism compatible with the one specified in ANSI X9.23 (this is only useful
if you happen to be doing crypto stuff for a bank), and an entropy source that
uses the Win32 CryptoAPI. The entropy source is particularly important, because
previously each Win32 application would have to have it's own code to supply
entropy for the library.

Besides these two new pieces of code, the only changes made were to fix
compilation problems with Visual C++. If you're not using Botan on Windows,
there is relatively little reason to upgrade to 1.2.1. However, if you do
continue to use 1.2.0, I would recommend you be careful about avoiding the
small number of functions which were removed or renamed in 1.2.1.

Regards,
  Jack