tron@Veritas.COM (Ronald S. Karr) (05/31/91)
Smail release 3.1.21 (patchlevel 21) is now available on uunet. This
fixes most reported bugs in release 3.1.20, which was supposed to be a
limited distribution.
Release 3.1.21 is intended for unlimited distribution. I do not
intend to post smail to the net, however, until smail has been
modified to limit its resource utilization. I also would like to see
it work better in an Internet environment (for example, using multiple
MX and A records where possible).
I am sorry that 3.1.21 took so long in coming out. The 3.1.20 release
had a fair number of installation-related bugs, and it shouldn't have
been left unpatched for as long as this.
For those with the 3.1.19 or an earlier release, please get a new copy
of the entire distribution. Patches from 3.1.19 to 3.1.21 are nearly
half a megabyte (there were some organizational changes between 3.1.19
and 3.1.20). There is a 36K compressed patch file available on uunet
that can be applied to release 3.1.20 to generate 3.1.21. I will also
mail the patch to anyone who asks.
The two files available on uunet are:
~ftp/mail/smail3.1.21.tar.Z - the complete distribution
~ftp/mail/smail-3.1.20-3.1.21.patch.Z - the patch from 3.1.20 to 3.1.21
Users on the Internet can ftp from uunet. Users with UUCP access in
the U.S. can use UUCP to uunet. Uunet has a 1-900 number, with quite
reasonable rates, that can be used with UUCP. If you want
information, I can send it to you.
Users outside of the U.S. should probably contact me if they do not
have access to uunet. We should arrange some kind of distribution
path for use in Europe. I will probably handle other continents and
countries on an individual per-site basis.
Here is a summary of the 3.1.21 release, from the README file.
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CHANGES IN THE 3.1.21 RELEASE
Release 3.1.21 is a patch release to smail3.1.20, which was a limited
release of smail. The 3.1.20 release included significant work on the
OS-configuration aspects of smail. The 3.1.21 is primarily a bug fix
release. All of the enhancements are limited in scope.
Some changes in 3.1.21 are:
1. Smail now tries to preserve the access time for mailbox files.
This allows programs to compare the access time and modification
time of mailbox files to determine if mail has arrived. The
usability of this depends upon your mail user interface.
2. Added some optimization options to the DNS router driver (bind)
to prevent lookups for domains that are known not to be in the
DNS, or for names that apparently are not domains.
3. Added support to the bind router for delivering mail only
to those sites with MX records. This is useful for some local
area networks, but is generally not advisable on the Internet.
4. Enhanced the /bin/mail "replacement" (in pd/binmail) to support
options of the SVR3 and SVR4 versions of /bin/mail.
5. Added support for HP-UX 7.0 and A/UX 2.0.
6. Better debugging messages are now generated, including complete
expanded headers, plus filenames (for appendfile) and shell
commands (for the pipe driver). Use a debugging level of at
least 6 to get all of the new debugging output.
Some bugs that were fixed:
1. Fixed a bug in the bind router that was resulting in considering
some MX entries for a host to be invalid. The problem fixed was
that the GETSHORT macro was being called with a regular char *
rather than an unsigned char *. On some machines that supply
a GETSHORT macro, this resulted in inappropriate sign extensions.
2. One C compiler (pcc for microport/286) couldn't handle four
HDREQ() macro calls in an if statement. These were broken up
into two if statements.
3. The help message printed by SMTP was in a single, multi-line
string which was too long for some compilers (Xenix/286). This
was broken up into multiple strings.
4. Several people pointed out that their systems could not include
both <sys/time.h> and <time.h>, as was done in src/main.c. Only
one of these will now be included, based on os-type.
5. The fwdfile director driver was calling xprintf with the wrong
number of arguments, if a parsing error was encountered in a
mailing list or .forward file, sometimes causing a core dump,
often generating less than meaningful error messages.
6. Some machines do not support the <<-EOF construct (indented here
documents) in /bin/sh. Uses of this construct were removed.
7. Shell scripts in the util source directory were not having the
X_UTIL_PATH_X replaced by a propper set of directories. This
resulted from the changes to mkdefs.sh in release 3.1.20. This
has been fixed.
8. On some systems (Motorola V.3.2), use of greater than 14 character
file names results in failure rather than name truncation. This
was a problem for the installation procedure which uses four-
character suffixes (.OLD and .NEW). These suffixes have been
changed to .O and .N.
9. When using the malloc library supplied with SVR3, a structure
cannot be referenced after it is freed. One known use of a
freed structure (in smtprecv.c) was modified.
10. I found another case where an @user@host address was being
generated, in smtplib.c.
11. Smail for SunOS will not compile correctly if /usr/5bin is in
your PATH before /bin. To compensate, the sun_os4 conf/os file
sets CC to /bin/cc explicitly.
12. The gethostbyname router driver was returning a NULL rather than
DB_NOMATCH in one case, causing occasionally incorrect behavior.
13. Fixed some problems with pathalias, including some problems with
ANSI C compilers, and a potential loop in generated output which
was exhibited at some sites by more recent postings of the USENET
map database.
14. The handling of :include: files would occasionally result in
inappropriate errors. This resulted from functions that were
supposed to return a value but instead had implicit returns.
The common symptom was an error message with a blank error.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
For users that are currently at the 3.1.18 or 3.1.19 release level,
here are the changes that were introduced in release 3.1.20.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
CHANGES IN THE 3.1.20 RELEASE
Release 3.1.20 is the first truly new release to come along in quite
some time. The past two releases, 3.1.18 and 3.1.19 involved very
little work. The 3.1.18 release fixed one bug, the 3.1.19 release was
merely a re-release of 3.1.18 with some new sample files added.
Some changes in 3.1.20 are:
1. The scripts for managing operating system configuration files have
changed substantially. The new system is more generalized, and
allows for much simpler addition of new parameters, as well as the
ability to override os-file parameters in the EDITME file.
However, older conf/os files are no longer compatible, and will
need to be rewritten.
2. Support for SVR4.0 and POSIX. Smail now compiles under SVR4.0,
and it also has some generic posix support, which the SVR4.0 and
SunOS4.1 conf/os files use a base.
3. I put smail under a new source control system. The new system is
SCCS-based, like the old one, but I was forced to reset the
SCCS-ID sequence for all source files. Thus, all files are
different, at least in their SCCS ID.
4. It should now be possible to compile smail with gcc, since the CC
attribute is now tunable in the EDITME file.
5. Smail can now be used as the execmail program for SCO Xenix.
6. The LOGNAME and USER variables can now be supported. See the
sender_env_variable attribute in the smail(5) man page.
7. The forwardfile driver now allows uid ranges to be specified, for
the caution and unsecure attributes. This allows greater
security, by forcing all low-numbered (1-10, though it is
configurable) user-IDs to be handled through the "nobody" id.
Some bugs that were fixed:
1. Outgoing SMTP messages will no longer generate the malformed
address @user@host.
2. Invalid headers should no longer cause smail to abort and leave
messages queued forever.
3. The bind router now includes resolv.h using the right path (at
least on all systems I know about).
4. Smail should now run correctly under SunOS4.1. Previously, smail
tried to reserve unlimited data and stack space (to prevent low
limits from impacting smail's ability to operate). However, this
prevented linking of shared libraries, for programs executed from
smail. Smail now has a configurable limit which is less than
unlimited for SunOS4.1 and SVR4.0.
5. A bug was fixed that several people reported, where long TZ
strings could cause smail to dump core.
6. A bug was fixed where smail would try to free the sender variable
in the SMTP code, even though the sender variable was not always
allocated with malloc. This caused random core dumps on some
machines. The sender variable is always allocated now.
7. The hashing functions were modified so they no longer require that
a cast yield an lvalue.
8. Some compiler errors on the RS6000, relating to enums being used
before being defined, should be fixed.
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--
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