2021-03-14: New experimental Big Eight Usenet signing key
I have finally done the work to create a new modern GnuPG signing key for
control messages for the Big Eight hierarchies and wired it into the
machinery that sends those control messages. I have sent one experimental
checkgroups message signed with that key:
<cmsg-20210314174844$1888@isc.org>
To test the automation, tomorrow the normal monthly checkgroups will be
issued, which should result in two control messages, one signed with the
new key and one with the old key.
I've used the same key ID for the new key as the old key so that updating
will be as simple as importing the new key.
This key is currently EXPERIMENTAL and I reserve the right to reissue the
key if anyone uncovers any problems. If you are in a position to do so,
please try verifying the control messages with the new key and verify that
the work properly. I plan on making this new key official some time next
month and will post a more general announcement to news.announce.newgroups
and news.admin.announce at that time.
The new key, signed with my personal key and the old hierarchy control
signing key, is available on my web site.
(The Big Eight hierarchies need a more official information page for news
administrators, I know, but one thing at a time.)
2021-03-20: rra-c-util 9.0
rra-c-util is my collection of support functions, Autoconf macros, test
programs, and other infrastructure that I use to build other packages.
This release includes lots of portability work to support the INN 2.6.4
release, much of it by Julien ÉLIE. There are some incompatibilities in
the Autoconf macros compared to previous versions, hence the version bump.
Rename all SQLite Autoconf macros from SQLITE to SQLITE3, including
their output variables and configure command-line options, to bring
the naming convention in line with common practice for software using
SQLite v3. Clear the SQLITE3 variables if the library was optional
and no working library was found.
Rename the KRB5_CPPFLAGS_GCC output variable from the RRA_LIB_KRB5
macro to KRB5_CPPFLAGS_WARNINGS to more accurately reflect its
intended use and to reflect that it works with Clang.
The m4/krb5.m4 Autoconf macros no longer define AM_CONDITIONAL
as a no-op if it's not already defined, since this may be unexpected
when loading a macro.
The RRA_LIB_KRB5 and RRA_LIB_KRB5_OPTIONAL macros now also check that
at least one Kerberos header file was found and either abort with an
error or mark Kerberos as unusable depending on the choice of macro.
Add C stubs for sd_notify and sd_notifyf and a
(non-functional) preprocessor stub for sd_is_socket for
portability for more APIs to systems without libsystemd.
Fix the RRA_PROG_PYTHON Python version test to work on Python 3.0 and
Python versions older than 2.7.
There are also some fixes for portability of the test suite and other
minor portability improvements.
You can get the latest release from the rra-c-util distribution page.
2021-03-20: pam-krb5 4.10
pam-krb5 is a relatively simple Kerberos PAM module with no dependencies
on larger infrastructure such as sssd.
This is a small bug-fix release that fixes a possible double-free if
krb5_cc_get_principal fails on the newly-acquired ticket cache
during authentication. I am dubious this is exploitable because this
temporary ticket cache should not be under the control of an attacker, but
I'm putting out a release just in case. Thanks to Michael Muehle for the
report.
You can get the latest release from the pam-krb5 distribution page.
2021-03-27: faq2html 1.36
faq2html is the program I use to turn various text files into web pages.
I've started adopting
CPAN::Changes::Spec for my Perl modules, and changes files in that
format look best if shown in a dense bullet list similar to:
- Remove single spaces at the start of lines in wrapped paragraphs.
- Encode output in UTF-8 if necessary.
- Strip formatting codes from headings that will go into the table of
contents or navbar, and fix the algorithm for adding anchors to account
for this transformation.
- Use Module::Build as the build system.
faq2html could deal with these if every line was its own bullet, but
couldn't handle line continuations, so the output looked poor. This new
release fixes that problem (in a somewhat overly complex way, but I'll
wait to fix that until I start refactoring it, which is on the menu for a
future project).
Note that there is a remaining ambiguity. When there is a blank line
between bullet items, I prefer to wrap the text of each bullet in
<p> to preserve that spacing (even though that makes the output
look awful in the Dreamwidth style
that I use and in the original style, due to a bug on their end I think).
But if that's the entirety of the list, which can happen with Changes
files, I'd prefer to omit the <p>. That requires defering output
of the bullet point until either more paragraphs that are part of the same
list are seen, or some other text is seen. That's a larger refactoring
that I'll put off until later.
I also released cvs2xhtml version 1.15 and cl2xhtml version 1.12. There
are no changes in the output of either of those programs; I just ported
them to Python 3, since I've uninstalled Python 2 from my systems.
You can get all of these tools from my web
tools distribution page.
2021-03-28: Pod::Thread 2.00
I am slowly working towards collecting twenty years of static web site
generation and release management tools into
DocKnot. Pod::Thread is the component
that turns POD documentation into HTML by converting it to thread, the
macro language that is the backbone of my static site generator, and then
letting spin turn the results into HTML.
I wrote this module years ago and have had it around as a private Perl
module, but since the version of DocKnot that incorporates spin will have
it as a dependency, it seemed time to publicly release it.
Compared to the last released version in 2013, it also has a few bug fixes
and improvements. The module now internally handles the navbar and table
of contents generation (by deferring output) rather than using a
pre-scanning pass in the driver script, and fixes the title casing of
DB_CONFIG in the output from one INN manual page. I also did a lot
of modernization and improvements to the test suite.
You can get the latest version from CPAN or the
Pod::Thread distribution page.
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