[Botan-announce] Botan 1.3.14 - first release candidate for 1.4.0

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

Botan 1.3.14 is now available. This is the first release candidate for 1.4.0,
so I would strongly suggest that you check your applications against this
release. The release plan is as follows: if I don't hear of any problems that
are major enough to require a second release candidate, then I will release
1.4.0 in two weeks, on June 26. If there are any problems that prevent 1.4.0
from being released, then I will release 1.3.15 on that day, with 1.4.0
following on July 17.

For those currently using 1.2.x: check doc/porting.txt in the
distribution. Several changes have been made that may cause your programs to
not compile. If your program fails to compile or run correctly against 1.3.14,
and the reason is not clearly described in the porting document, send me a
testcase as soon as possible. Differences between 1.2.x and 1.4.0 are fairly
small (much smaller than the 1.0->1.2 changes), but they will likely impact at
least a few applications. If there is a change (even one documented in the
porting guide) that is an absolute showstopper for you, let me know. I can't
guarantee that I will provide a workaround, but I'll at least consider it.

Now, as to what's new in this release. AEP Systems kindly provided me with an
AEP2000 crypto accelerator so I could write a driver for Botan. If you have the
drivers installed (RedHat includes them in the hwcrypto package), include the
eng_aep module when configuring Botan to add support for the card - everything
will work fine even if you don't have the hardware, but Botan will
automatically use it if it's available. Justin Karneges submitted a mutex
module using Qt, which is now included. New modules for Win32 were added,
providing high-resolution timers and memory locking. And of course there are
various bug fixes, optimizations, and minor new features; check the changelog
for details. The documentation has been updated, and, as far as I know,
reflects the current API completely.

I've fixed some configure and build problems on Solaris, S/390 Linux, OpenBSD,
MacOS X, and Sun's C++ compiler.

I've tested this release on Linux/x86 with various GCC versions (2.95.3 through
3.4.0), KAI C++ (3.4g and 4.0e) and ICC 7.1, as well as Visual C++ on Win2K,
and on Linux/390, Linux/amd64, MacOS X 10.2, Solaris/x86, and Solaris/SPARC
using various GCC flavors, as well as Sun's C++ compiler on both Solaris
machines.

Known issues:

 * FreeBSD 5 prior to 5.2.1 has major libc-related build problems. Apparently
     5.2.1 is fixed, if someone can confirm I would appreciate it (only have
     access to 4.10 and 5.1 systems). 4.10 is mostly working but needs some
     help.
 * Some, but not all, GCC 2.95.x installs have problems with std::make_pair at
     points, removing the std:: fixes it. This seems to be limited to
     vendor-modified versions, stock 2.95.3 is OK.
 * Older GCC versions (2.95.x, 3.0) fail badly on Alpha with any optimization,
     producing code that crashes or creates incorrect results. Use -O0 or get a
     fixed compiler.

I would recommend you build the library and run the validation suite on any
platform with any compiler you care about using, especially the proprietary
Unix compilers (Compaq C++, MIPSpro, aCC, etc), as I don't have access to any
systems with those compilers right now, and any Windows compilers you use (I
only have Visual C++ 7.0).

Regards,
  Jack Lloyd