| < 2017 Changes | Russ Allbery > Recent Changes | 2015 Changes > |
This page lists all changes to my web site in 2016, except for new journal entries, along with a brief description. For more recent changes and the current RSS feed, see the current changes page. For older changes, see the changes for 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, and 2008.
Review of Secrets of Productive People by Mark Forster.
Review of Magician's Gambit by David Eddings.
Review of Queen of Sorcery by David Eddings.
Review of Pawn of Prophecy by David Eddings.
Use https for the constructed URLs for generated links from my journal's RSS feed.
Review of The Kingdom of Gods by N.K. Jemisin.
New configuration option, cracklib_maxlen, to not test longer passwords with CrackLib. require_classes can take a numeric argument, meaning to require that many classes. Start error messages with a capital letter. Work with the default (buggy) DB_File::Lock. Apply SuSE patch for a buffer overflow in the embedded CrackLib (not reachable in this package). Patch the embedded mkdict and packer to not create invalid dictionaries. Install configuration instructions as man pages instead of putting everything in README.
Add template support for generating the build and testing sections for Autoconf and Perl packages. Add support for license notices and formatting for them. Add support for short quotes in thread output. Add support for additional bootstrapping instructions.
Review of A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman.
Correctly handle -Wno-* options when probing for compiler warning flags. Always add -Werror for both GCC and Clang. New is_file_contents test function in Test::RRA. New test for non-https eyrie.org URLs and my old email address. New utility function to find interesting files in an Automake distribution. Require Test::Strict 0.25 or later for better behavior in the strictness test.
Review of Warchild by Karin Lowachee.
Add is_bool function to the C test library.
Support for the new COMPRESS extension. Fixes various bugs around state changes when negotiating various compression or integrity layers and fixes some issues with nnrpd's validation of newly-posted messages. (Messages with Received and Posted headers are no longer rejected; messages with all-whitespace headers now are.) This release also supports OpenSSL 1.1.0 and fixes an nntpsend bug under systemd.
Update license dates, fix link to the Debian package tracker.
Run non-building commands under set -x for better debugging information and more details about the exact command being run.
Review of The Philosopher Kings by Jo Walton.
Review of The Broken Kingdoms by N.K. Jemisin.
Review of Digger by Ursula Vernon.
Fix Pod::Text deletion of the open bracket character on EBCDIC systems. Further modernization of the test suite.
Review of The Just City by Jo Walton.
Add winner of 2016 World Fantasy Award for best novel (Anna Smaill's The Chimes).
Add ansi16 through ansi255 aliases (and similarly for on_ansi and constants) for consistent naming of all 256 extended colors.
Initial public release.
Regenerate the rra-c-util web page using DocKnot (not yet released).
Regenerate the C TAP Harness web page using DocKnot (not yet released). This is a new documentation system that will hopefully be generating all of the web pages for my software packages going forward.
Review of Lord of Emperors by Guy Gavriel Kay.
Review of The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman.
remctl-shell now supports being run as a forced command. The summary configuration option can now be used with commands that have subcommands other than ALL. Support passing in additional compiler and linker flags for binaries to allow them to be built with -fPIE.
Correct return-value checks for snprintf to avoid off-by-one errors. New RRA_PROG_CC_FLAG Autoconf macro to check if a compiler supports a flag. New RRA_PROG_CC_WARNINGS_FLAGS macro to probe for all of my standard warning flgs. Fix Test::RRA::Config with Perl 5.22.2.
Review of Uprooted by Naomi Novik.
Review of Winds of Fury by Mercedes Lackey.
Review of Winds of Change by Mercedes Lackey.
Review of Sailing to Sarantium by Guy Gavriel Kay.
Add the 2016 British Fantasy winner for best fantasy novel (Uprooted, by Naomi Novik).
Partially revert the change to make piping POD into pod2man without the --name flag an error. Now Pod::Man and pod2man silently uses the name STDIN. Fix a rendering bug with TRUE (1) in Pod::Man. Add new --lquote and --rquote options to pod2man and Pod::Man. Remove a test that uses deprecated L<> syntax that will no longer be supported in Pod::Simple.
Add the 2016 Clarke winner for best novel (Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky), and the 2016 Mythopoeic winner for best adult novel (Uprooted, by Naomi Novik).
Add the 2016 Hugo winner for best novel (The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin), and the 2016 Campbell Memorial winner (Radiomen by Eleanor Lerman).
Add the 2016 Aurora winner for best English novel (A Daughter of No Nation by A.M. Dellamonica).
Review of Winds of Fate by Mercedes Lackey.
Stop using the old backports location for oldstable-backports. Add new GIT_PBUILDER_PDEBUILDOPTIONS environment variable to configure options to pass directly to git-pbuilder.
Add new server implementation, remctl-shell, which supports the same configuration but is intended to run as the shell of a dedicated user and accept commands via ssh. Add a new configuration option, sudo, which uses sudo to run the command as a different user.
Review of The Run of His Life by Jeffrey Toobin.
2016 nominees for best novel in the World Fantasy awards.
Review of Coming Home by Jack McDevitt.
Add winners of the Locus awards for best SF novel (Ancillary Mercy, by Ann Leckie) and best fantasy novel (Uprooted, by Naomi Novik).
Review of Ashes of Honor by Seanan McGuire.
Review of Furiously Happy by Jenny Lawson.
Review of Matter by Iain M. Banks.
Review of By the Sword by Mercedes Lackey.
Review of Empires of EVE by Andrew Groen.
Review of Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen by Lois McMaster Bujold.
Add the winner of the 2016 Nebula award for best novel (Uprooted, by Naomi Novik).
Add all the nominees for the Arthur C. Clarke award and links to reviews if I've read them.
Clarify that Locus best SF novel awards before 1980 were just the general best novel award, and the split was introduced in 1980.
Annotated list of the 100 books published in the blog article, plus a new section of the review site for lists of best books plus links to my reviews.
Add the nominees for the 2016 Hugo award for best novel.
Port the PHP extension to PHP 7. This is will be the maintained version going forward; the PHP 5 extension should be considered frozen. Fix lots of portability issues to older versions of Heimdal. Fix various issues with the RPM spec.
Remove remaining uses of strlcpy and strlcat and stop providing them. Make network_set_freebind, network_set_reuseaddr, and network_set_v6only public functions. Fix the OpenSSL probe for 1.1.0. Add new Autoconf probes for Perl properties. Add a replacement for gss_oid_equal for old versions of Heimdal. Change to C_TAP_SOURCE and C_TAP_BUILD for test suite code, following the changes in C TAP Harness 4.0.
Start the migration from SOURCE and BUILD to C_TAP_SOURCE and C_TAP_BUILD for both C preprocessor directives and environment variables. For now, both environment variables are set. Fix a missing va_end.
Review of The Language of Power by Rosemary Kirstein.
Review of The Effective Engineer by Edmond Lau.
Review of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson.
Review of The Oath by Jeffrey Toobin.
Add recent award winners: Aurora (A Play of Shadow by Julie E. Czerneda), BSFA (The House of Shattered Wings by Aliette de Bodard), Clarke (Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel), Sunburst (The Back of the Turtle by Thomas King), and Tiptree (Lizard Radio by Pat Schmatz).
Drop support for non-ASCII characters in color aliases so that the module memory usage can be decreased substantially. Improve the module metadata and the cleanliness of the Makefile.PL.
Fix an uninitialized variable warning when run on a module file in the current directory. Fix an unnecessary warning during Perl core builds. Fix a long-standing bug with turning off italic font in =item text inside a C<> block.
Review of The Lost Steersman by Rosemary Kirstein.
Add the nominees for the Nebula Award for best novel that will be awarded in 2016.
Added Ursula Vernon and Lawyers, Guns & Money. Removed Charlie Stross and the Dwarf Fortress development log.
All of this web site is now served over TLS using certificates from Let's Encrypt, and all HTTP access redirects to the HTTPS URLs.
Remove the changes from December 2015 from the Recent Changes page.
Review of Oathblood by Mercedes Lackey.
More build system changes to merge the build system in Perl core. No code changes in this release. Don't generate the man page for perlpodstyle when built in Perl core, handle scripts ending in .com on VMS systems, and rename perlpodstyle back to perlpodstyle.pod since we're no longer using Module::Build.
Add support for bootstrap scripts alongside autogen. This is apparently the new standard in the Autoconf world.
Use the user-supplied --basepath argument if present rather than always creating a new one.
Initial, experimental support for using Active Directory as a keytab backend. New nested ACL scheme that groups other ACLs. New external ACL scheme that runs an external command. New ldap-attr-root ACL scheme that works like ldap-attr but requires root instances. New password object type that generates passwords if one wasn't stored. New update wallet command to update an object regardless of the unchanging flag. New acl replace command to change all objects owned by one ACL to another. Fixes for ACL display. New reports to list unstored objects, object types, ACL schemes, and ACLs that nest another ACL. Improved wallet history report.
Add HTML versions of the documentation for the two module-version test scripts and the xmalloc API.
New @MODULE_VERSION_IGNORE setting for the module-version.t test. Moved common code between the two module-version.t test scripts into a module. Fixed the Perl docs/synopsis.t test to not use UNIX-specific paths. Made util/network/server-t more robust against IPv6 being available but not usable.
Reintroduce the pod2man.PL and pod2text.PL generator wrappers for better scripts on non-UNIX platforms. Fall back to non-utf8 behavior if the utf8 option is specified but Encode is not available. Don't try to remove the temporary directory in each test because it causes races.
Also drop checkgroups for reserved hierarchies. Drop newgroup and rmgroup messages for control, general, junk, test, and to top-level groups. Add clean and distclean Makefile targets. Clean up license statements. Add control, junk, to, general, and private as reserved hierarchies. Update metadata and PGP key for dictator. Mark wpg as no longer having an active maintainer.
Fix test portability to Windows by not assuming UNIX path delimiters. Don't include .travis.yml in the distribution. Add homepage information to the CPAN metadata and switch the Git repository to GitHub.
All of the interesting commands in this Internet-Draft were standardized or superseded by the work in RFC 6048. Adjust the description of the draft accordingly.
Add uncovered new drafts for draft-ietf-drums-MHRegistry and draft-josefsson-openpgp-mailnews-header, and the new drafts draft-palme-supersedes and draft-ietf-mailext-new-fields. Add RFCs 3767, 4289, and 6838 to the related RFCs, add a mention of 2048 in the obsolete section, and move 4288 to obsolete.
Add an overview of my 2015 reading, main book recommendations, and reading statistics.
Move all web site changes for 2015 to a separate page and remove all entries older than December of 2015 from the current changes page.
| < 2017 Changes | Russ Allbery > Recent Changes | 2015 Changes > |