| Russ Allbery > Software > INN > INN CURRENT Documentation | TODO > |
This file is for people who are interested in making modifications to INN. Normal users can safely skip reading it. It is intended primarily as a guide, resource, and accumulation of tips for maintainers and contributors, and secondarily as documentation of some of INN's internals.
First of all, if you plan on working on INN source, please start from the current development tree. There may be significant changes from the previous full release, so starting from development sources will make it considerably easier to integrate your work. You can check out or clone the current development tree using Git from:
<https://github.com/InterNetNews/inn.git>
or browse the current development source on Github at:
<https://github.com/InterNetNews/inn>
You will need autoconf 2.64 or later to use the development tree. After
checking out the tree, run ./autogen to generate the necessary autoconf
files.
Pull requests must complete an automatic build/test cycle with warnings
enabled. You can run an equivalent build with ./ci/test.
Daily snapshots can be found at:
<https://ftp.isc.org/isc/inn/snapshots/>
All INN code should be written expecting ANSI C and POSIX. There is no
need to attempt to support pre-ANSI compilers, and ANSI-only features such
as <stdarg.h>, string concatenation, #elif, and token pasting
may be used freely. So far as possible, INN is written to attempt to be
portable to any system new enough that someone is likely to want to run a
news server on it, but whenever possible this portability should be
provided by checking for standard behavior in configure and supplying
replacements for standard functions that are missing.
When there is a conflict between ANSI C and C99, INN code should be written expecting C99 and autoconf used to patch up the differences.
Try to avoid using #ifdef and the like in the middle of code as much as
possible. Instead, try to isolate the necessary portability bits and
include them in libinn or at least in conditional macros separate from
the code. Trying to read code littered with conditional compilation
directives is much more difficult.
The shell script configure at the top level of the source tree is generated by autoconf from configure.ac and the additional macros in the m4 directory, and include/config.h.in is generated by autoheader from configure.ac. At configure time, configure generates include/config.h and several other files based on options it was given and what it discovers about the target system.
All modifications to configure should instead be made to
configure.ac. The autoconf manual (available using info autoconf
if you have autoconf and the GNU info utilities installed on your
system) is a valuable reference when making any modifications.
To regenerate configure, just run autoconf. To regenerate
include/config.h.in, run autoheader. Alternately, to regenerate
both, you can run ./autogen. Please don't include patches to either
configure or include/config.h.in when sending patches to INN;
instead, note in your patch that those files must be regenerated. These
(and all other) generated files should not be checked into Git.
At the time of this writing, autoconf 2.64 or later is required.
The supporting files for autoconf are in the support subdirectory, including the files config.guess and config.sub to determine the system name and ltmain.sh for Libtool support. The latter file comes from the Debian package of Libtool, available from <https://packages.debian.org/libtool> (ltmain.sh is generated in the build-aux subdirectory after building the package with for instance debuild -us -uc); the canonical versions of the former two files are available from <https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/config/> (which currently redirects to <https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/config.git/tree/>).
In addition, m4/libtool.m4 and a few other m4 files used by INN are just a copy of the corresponding files in the m4 subdirectory of the Debian package of the Libtool distribution. (Using Libtool without using automake requires a few odd hacks.) New versions should be checked in periodically when available. There are no INN-specific modifications to those files except for ltmain.sh which recognizes the additional -S flag that INN's install-sh script uses, and a fix for a proper handling of circular dependencies.
This install-sh script should also be updated at the same time from <https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/automake.git/tree/>; it similarly contains a local modification mentioned in a comment at the beginning of the file.
Finally, the m4/pkg.m4 macro should be updated from <https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pkg-config/pkg-config/>.
Automatic build logs on several platforms are available at <http://usenet.trigofacile.com/autobuild/inn/>.
INN's documentation is currently somewhat in a state of flux. Much of the documentation is still in the form of man pages written directly in nroff. Some parts of the documentation have been rewritten in POD; that documentation can be found in doc/pod. The canonical source for most of the text documentation, including README, INSTALL, NEWS, and this file, is also POD.
If you're modifying some part of INN's documentation and see that it has a POD version in doc/pod, you should make the modifications to the POD source and then regenerate the derived files. For a quick introduction to POD, see the perlpod(1) man page on your system (it should be installed if you have Perl installed).
When writing new documentation, write in whatever format you care to; if necessary, we can always convert it to POD or whatever else we want to use. Having the documentation exist in some form is more important than what language you write it in. If you don't have a preference, however, we prefer new documentation to be in POD.
If you use POD or regenerate POD documentation, please install something
close to the latest versions of the POD processing utilities to avoid
changes to the documentation depending on who generated it last. You can
find the latest version of the podlators distribution on CPAN
(<https://metacpan.org/dist/podlators>). For versions of Perl before 5.6.1
(as Perl 5.6.1 and later come with a recent enough version), you'll also need
Pod::Parser (see <https://metacpan.org/pod/Pod-Parser>).
There are makefile rules in doc/pod/Makefile to build all of the
documentation whose master form is POD; if you add additional
documentation, please add a rule there as well. Documentation should be
generated by cd'ing to doc/pod and typing make file where file is
the relative path to the documentation file. This will get all of the
various flags right for pod2text or pod2man.
INN has a set of generic error handling routines that should be used as much as possible so that the same syntax can be used for reporting errors everywhere in INN. The six basic functions are notice, sysnotice, warn, syswarn, die, and sysdie; notice prints or logs an informative message, warn prints or logs a warning, and die does the same and then exits the current program. The sys* versions add a colon, a space, and the value of strerror(errno) to the end of the message, and should be used to report failing system calls.
All of the actual error reporting is done via error handlers, and a program can register its own handlers in addition to or instead of the default one. The default error handler (message_log_stderr) prints to stderr, prepending the value of message_program_name if it's set to something other than NULL. Several other error handlers are available, particularly including ones that use syslog. See include/inn/messages.h for all of the available options.
There is a different set of error handlers for notice/sysnotice, warn/syswarn, and die/sysdie. To set them, make calls like:
message_handlers_warn(1, message_log_stderr);
message_handlers_die(2, message_log_stderr, message_log_syslog_err);
The first argument is the number of handlers, and the remaining arguments are pointers to functions taking an int (the length of the formatted message), a const char * (the format), a va_list (the arguments), and an int that's 0 if warn or die was called and equal to the value of errno if syswarn or sysdie was called. The length of the formatted message is obtained by calling vsnprintf with the provided format and arguments, and therefore is reliable to use as the size of a buffer to malloc to hold the result of formatting the message provided that vsnprintf is used to format it (warning: the system vsprintf may produce more output under some circumstances, so always use vsnprintf).
The error handler can do anything it wishes; each error handler is called in the sequence given. Error handlers shouldn't call warn or die unless great caution is taken to prevent infinite recursion. Also be aware that sysdie is called if malloc fails in xmalloc, so if the error handler needs to allocate memory, it must not use xmalloc or a related function to do so and it must not call die to report failure. The default syslog handlers report memory allocation failure to stderr and exit.
Finally, die and sysdie support an additional handler (the external variable message_fatal_cleanup) that's called immediate before exiting, takes no arguments, and returns an int which is used as the argument for exit. It can do any necessary global cleanup, call abort instead to generate a core dump or the like.
The advantage of using this system everywhere in INN is that library code can use notice, warn, and die to report messages and errors, and each calling program can set up the handlers as appropriate to make sure the errors go to the right place. The default handler is fine for interactive programs; for programs that run from interactive scripts, adding something like:
message_program_name = "program";
to the beginning of main (where program is the name of the program) will make it easier to figure out which program the script calls is failing. For programs that may also be called non-interactively, like rnews, one may want to set up handlers like:
message_handlers_notice(2, message_log_stdout, message_log_syslog_info);
message_handlers_warn(2, message_log_stderr, message_log_syslog_warning);
message_handlers_die(2, message_log_stderr, message_log_syslog_err);
Finally, for daemons and other non-interactive programs, one may want to do:
message_handlers_notice(1, message_log_syslog_info);
message_handlers_warn(1, message_log_syslog_warning);
message_handlers_die(1, message_log_syslog_err);
to report errors only via syslog. (Note that if you use syslog error handlers, the program should call openlog first thing to make sure they are logged with the right facility.)
For historical reasons, error messages that are fatal to the news subsystem are logged at the LOG_CRIT priority, and therefore die in innd should use message_log_syslog_crit. This seems like priority inflation and may change in the future to message_log_syslog_err.
The test suite for INN is located in the tests directory and is just getting started. The test suite consists of a set of programs listed in tests/TESTS and the scaffolding in the runtests program.
Adding new tests is very straightforward and very flexible. Just write a
program that tests some part of INN, put it in a directory under tests
named after the part of INN it's testing, and have it output first a line
containing the count of test cases in that file, and then for each test a
line saying ok n or not ok n where n is the test case number.
(If a test is skipped for some reason, such as a test of an optional
feature that wasn't compiled into INN, the test program should output ok
n # skip.) Add any rules necessary to build the test to
tests/Makefile (note that for simplicity it doesn't recurse into
subdirectories) and make sure it creates an executable ending in .t.
Then add the name of the test to tests/TESTS, without the .t ending.
For C tests, you probably want to use the functions in tests/tap/basic.c (prototypes in tests/tap/basic.h) to handle all of the output. For shell script tests, tests/tap/libtap.sh contains helpful shell functions. See the existing tests for some hints about how to write new tests, as well as the tests/README guide.
One naming convention: to distinguish more easily between for example
lib/error.c (the implementation) and tests/lib/error-t.c (the test
suite), we add -t to the end of the test file names. So
tests/lib/error-t.c is the source that compiles into an executable
tests/lib/error.t which is run by putting a line in tests/TESTS of
just lib/error.
Note that tests don't have to be written in C; in fact, lib/xmalloc.t is just a shell script (that calls a supporting C program). Tests can be written in shell or Perl (but other languages should be avoided because someone who wants to run the test suite may not have it) and just have to follow the above output conventions.
Additions to the test suite, no matter how simple, are very welcome.
Running the test suite is done with:
make check
A single test can be run with verbose ouput via:
tests/runtests -o <name-of-test>
Using runtests ensures that necessary environment variables are set up.
All INN Makefiles include Makefile.global at the top level, and only
that makefile is a configure substitution target. This has the
disadvantage that configure's normal support for building in a tree
outside of the source tree doesn't work, but it has the significant
advantage of making configure run much faster and allowing one to run
make in any subdirectory and pick up all the definitions and settings
from the top level configuration.
All INN Makefiles should also set $(top) to be the path to the top of
the build directory (usually relative). This path is used to find various
programs like fixscript and Libtool so that the same macros (set in
Makefile.global) can be used all over INN.
The format of INN's Makefiles is mostly standardized; the best examples of
the format are probably frontends/Makefile and backends/Makefile, at
least for directories with lots of separate programs. The ALL variable
holds all the files that should be generated, EXTRA those additional
files that were generated by configure, and SOURCES the C source
files for generating tag information.
There are a set of standard installation commands defined in make variables by Makefile.global, and these should be used for all file installations. See the comment blocks in Makefile.global.in for information on what commands are available and when they should be used. There are also variables set for each of the installation directories that INN uses, for use in building the list of installed paths to files.
Each subdirectory makefile should have the targets all (the default),
clean, clobber/distclean, install, and profiled. The
profiled target generates a profiling version of the programs (although
this hasn't been tested much). These rules should be present and empty in
those directories where they don't apply.
Be sure to test compiling with both static and dynamic libraries and make
sure that all the Libtool support works correctly. All linking steps, and
the compile steps for all library source, should be done through $(LIBCC)
and $(LIBLD) (which will be set as appropriate in Makefile.global).
INN comes with and installs a large number of different scripts, both Bourne shell and Perl, and also comes with support for Tcl scripts (although it doesn't come with any). Shell variables containing both configure-time information and configuration information from inn.conf are set by the innshellvars support libraries, so the only system-specific configuration that should have to be done is fixing the right path to the interpreter and adding a line to load the appropriate innshellvars.
support/fixscript, built by configure, does this. It takes a .in file and generates the final script (removing the .in) by fixing the path to the interpreter on the first line and replacing the second line, whatever it is, with code to load the innshellvars appropriate for that interpreter. (If invoked with -i, it just fixes the interpreter path.)
Scripts should use innshellvars (via fixscript) to get the right path and the right variables whenever possible, rather than having configure substitute values in them. Any values needed at run-time should instead be available from all of the different innshellvars.
As for Perl, the INN::Config module has the same features as
innshellvars.pl (only kept for compatibility reasons with old scripts
not shipped with INN); however, it can be safely used with warnings on
in Perl scripts.
See the existing scripts for examples of how this is done.
Include files relevant to all of INN, or relevant to the two libraries built as part of INN (the utility libinn library and the libinnstorage library that contains all storage and overview functions) are found in the include directory; other include files relevant only to a portion of INN are found in the relevant directory.
Practically all INN source files will start with:
#include "portable/system.h"
This header file includes config.h, which picks up all defines generated by autoconf and is necessary for types that may not be present on all systems (uid_t, pid_t, size_t, uint32_t, and the like). It therefore should be included before any other headers that use those types, as well as to get general configuration information. The config.h header also includes inn/macros.h, inn/options.h, inn/system.h and portable/stdbool.h which pick up additional support macros and compile-time configuration.
Besides, portable/system.h also includes all of the following headers, portably:
#include <inttypes.h> #include <limits.h> #include <stdarg.h> #include <stdbool.h> #include <stddef.h> #include <stdint.h> #include <stdio.h> #include <stdlib.h> #include <string.h> #include <strings.h> #include <sys/types.h> #include <unistd.h>
except that it doesn't include headers that are missing on a given system, replaces functions not found on the system with the INN equivalents, provides macros that INN assumes are available but which weren't found, and defines some additional portability things. Even if this is more headers than the source file actually needs, it's generally better to just include portable/system.h rather than trying to duplicate the autoconf-driven hackery that it does to do things portably. The primary exception is for source files in lib that only define a single function and are used for portability; those may want to include only config.h so that they can be easily used in other projects that use autoconf. config.h is a fairly standard header name for this purpose.
There are portable wrappers around several header files that have known portability traps or that need some fixing up on some platforms. Look in include/portable and familiarize yourself with them and use them where appropriate.
Another frequently included header file is inn/libinn.h, which among other things defines xmalloc(), xrealloc(), xstrdup(), and xcalloc(), which are checked versions of the standard memory allocation routines that terminate the program if the memory allocation fails. These should generally always be used instead of the regular C versions. inn/libinn.h also provides various other utility functions that are frequently used.
inn/paths.h includes a wide variety of paths determined at configure time, both default paths to various parts of INN and paths to programs. Don't just use the default paths, though, if they're also configurable in inn.conf; instead, call innconf_read() and use the global innconf structure.
Other files in include are interfaces to particular bits of INN library functionality or are used for other purposes; see the comments in each file.
Eventually, the header files will be separated into installed header files and uninstalled header files; the latter are those headers that are used only for compiling INN and aren't useful for users of INN's libraries (such as innperl.h). All of the installed headers will live in include/inn and be installed in a subdirectory named inn in the configured include directory. This conversion is still in progress.
When writing header files, remember that C reserves all identifiers beginning with two underscores and all identifiers beginning with an underscore and a capital letter for the use of the implementation; don't use any identifiers with names like that. Additionally, any identifier beginning with an underscore and a lower-case letter is reserved in file scope, which means that such identifiers can only be used by INN for the name of structure members or function arguments in function prototypes.
Try to pay attention to the impact of a header file on the program
namespace, particularly for installed header files in include/inn. All
symbols defined by a header file should ideally begin with INN_,
inn_, or some other unique prefix indicating the subsystem that symbol
is part of, to avoid accidental conflicts with symbols defined by the
program that uses that header file.
INN includes three shared libraries, in lib, storage, and
history. Whenever any of the source to those libraries is modified,
the library version information must be updated at the top of the
Makefile in that directory. Follow the instructions in the Libtool
manual under Versioning / Updating version info, with the exception that,
contrary to point 2, it's useful to those running snapshots to update the
version information more frequently than for each public release.
Remember that the version information has to be updated to allow recovery
from a make update command.
INN has quite a variety of coding styles intermixed. As with all programs, it's preferable when making minor modifications to keep the coding style of the code you're modifying. In INN, that will vary by file. (Over time we're trying to standardize on one coding style, so changing the region you worked on to fit the general coding style is also acceptable).
When modifying or writing new code in C, it should conform to the
Clang-format style of the project. Similarly, Perl, Python and shell
scripts should conform to respectively the perltidy, Black and shfmt
code styles of the project. Just run make reformat at the top level of the
source tree to properly reformat all files.
If you're writing a substantial new piece of code, the prevailing "standard" INN coding style is the following:
Write in regular ANSI C whenever possible. Use the normal ANSI and POSIX constructs and use autoconf or portability wrappers to fix things up beforehand so that the code itself can read like regular ANSI or POSIX code. Code should be written so that it works as expected on a modern platform and is fixed up with portability tricks for older platforms, not the other way around. You may assume an ANSI C compiler.
Try to use const wherever appropriate. Don't use register; modern compilers will do as good of a job as you will in choosing what to put into a register. Don't bother with restrict (at least yet).
Use string handling functions that take counts for the size of the buffer whenever possible. This means using snprintf in preference to sprintf and using strlcpy and strlcat in preference to strcpy and strcat. Also, use strlcpy and strlcat instead of strncpy and strncat, as it is much easier to audit uses of the former than the latter. strlcpy is like strncpy except that it always nul-terminates and doesn't fill the rest of the buffer with nuls, making it more efficient. strlcat is like strncat except that it always nul-terminates and it takes the total size of the buffer as its third argument rather than just the amount of space left. All of these functions are guaranteed to be available; there are replacements in lib for systems that don't have them.
If you have to use a string copying routine that doesn't nul-terminate, use memcpy instead. Avoid introducing any uses of strcpy, strcat, strncpy, or strncat so that we can use grep to find dangerous usages and switch them to better functions.
Avoid #ifdef and friends whenever possible. Particularly avoid using
them in the middle of code blocks. Try to hide all portability
preprocessor magic in header files or in portability code in lib. When
something just has to be done two completely different ways depending on
the platform or compile options or the like, try to abstract that
functionality out into a generic function and provide two separate
implementations using #ifdef; then the main code can just call that
function.
If you do have to use preprocessor defines, note that if you always define
them to either 0 or 1 (never use #define without a second
argument), you can use the preprocessor define in a regular if statement
rather than using #if or #ifdef. Make use of this instead of
#ifdef when possible, since that way the compiler will still
syntax-check the other branch for you and it makes it far easier to
convert the code to use a run-time check if necessary. (Unfortunately,
this trick can't be used if one branch may call functions unavailable on a
particular platform.)
Avoid uses of fixed-width buffers except in performance-critical code, as it's harder to be sure that such code is correct and it tends to be less flexible later on. If you need a reusable, resizable memory buffer, one is provided in lib/buffer.c.
Avoid uses of static variables whenever possible, particularly in libraries, because it interferes with making the code re-entrant down the road and makes it harder to follow what's going on. Similarly, avoid using global variables whenever possible, and if they are required, try to wrap them into structures that could later be changed into arguments to the affected functions.
Use a roughly BSD indentation style but with four-space indents. This means no space before the parenthesis around function arguments, open brace on the same line as if/while/for, and close and open brace on the same line as else.
Introductory comments for functions or files are generally written as:
/*
** Introductory comment.
*/
Other multiline comments in the source are generally written as:
/* This is a
multiline comment. */
Comments before functions saying what they do are nice to have.
Checks for NULL pointers are preferably written out explicitly; in other words, use:
if (p != NULL)
rather than:
if (p)
to make it clearer what the code is assuming.
It's better to always put the body of an if statement on a separate
line, even if it's only a single line. In other words, write:
if (p != NULL)
return p;
and not:
if (p != NULL) return p;
This is in part for a practical reason: some code coverage analysis tools like purecov will count the second example above as a single line and won't notice if the condition always evaluates the same way.
Plain structs make perfectly reasonable abstract data types; it's not
necessary to typedef the struct to something else. Structs are actually
very useful for opaque data structures, since you can predeclare them and
then manipulate pointers to them without ever having to know what the
contents look like. Please try to avoid typedefs except for function
pointers or other extremely confusing data types, or for data types where
we really gain some significant data abstraction from hiding the
underlying data type. Also avoid using the _t suffix for any type; all
types ending in _t are reserved by POSIX. For typedefs of function
pointer types, a suffix of _func usually works.
This style point is currently widely violated inside of INN itself; INN originally made extensive use of typedefs.
When noting something that should be improved later, add a comment
containing FIXME: so that one can easily grep for such comments.
For users of emacs cc-mode, use auto-formatting with clang-format and Black.
Finally, if possible, please don't use tabs in source files, since they can expand differently in different environments. In particular, please try not to use the mix of tabs and spaces that is the default in emacs. If you use emacs to edit INN code, you may want to put:
; Use only spaces when indenting or centering, no tabs.
(setq-default indent-tabs-mode nil)
in your ~/.emacs file.
Note that this is only a rough guideline and the maintainers aren't style nazis; we're more interested in your code contribution than in how you write it.
This is a checklist that INN maintainers should go through when preparing a new release of INN.
Update the files shipped with INN, and that are maintained by external projects.
Make sure that support/config.guess, support/config.sub, support/install-sh, support/ltmain.sh, Libtool m4 files (libtool.m4, ltoptions.m4, ltsugar.m4, ltversion.m4 and lt~obsolete.m4) and m4/pkg.m4 are the latest versions. See the instructions in Configuring and Portability for details on how to update these files. When updating executable files, verify that the committed version is still executable.
Make sure that the latest upstream version of the C TAP Harness package is used for the test suite driver. It is available at <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/software/c-tap-harness/>, and can be easily synchronized with the script support/getc-tap-harness; just run it, have a look at the resulting changes in INN source code and, if everything seems all right, commit these changes.
Parts specific to INN should be kept during an update (especially sections relative to LIBTEST_NEW_FORMAT because the test suite has not yet been fully updated to use the new format of C TAP Harness).
Make sure that the latest upstream version of the files maintained in the rra-c-util package that INN uses are the ones shipped with the release. These files are available at <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/software/rra-c-util/> and can be easily synchronized with the script support/getrra-c-util; just run it, have a look at the resulting changes in INN source code and, if everything seems all right, commit these changes.
Make sure that control/pgpverify.in is in sync with the master version at <https://ftp.isc.org/pub/pgpcontrol/>.
Make sure that samples/control.ctl and samples/nocem.ctl are in sync with the master version at <https://ftp.isc.org/pub/usenet/CONFIG/control.ctl> and <http://rosalind.home.xs4all.nl/nocemreg/nocemreg.html>.
Monitor changes carried on a few other projects.
Check whether patches from OpenSSL (apps/lib/s_cb.c, apps/s_server.c and crypto/bio/bio_dump.c at <https://github.com/openssl/openssl>) could be merged into nnrpd/tls.c, and new TLS versions could be supported in the tlsprotocols parameter in inn.conf.
Check whether recent LibreSSL releases have backported new functions from OpenSSL, that could then be enabled in nnrpd for LibreSSL, if that's not already the case.
Build INN (including the contrib and tests directories) with
warnings on (make warnings) and run the test suite (make tests).
Fix any errors.
Several builds with different configure-time options should be tested, so as to be sure they work fine (especially --enable-shared=no, --enable-tagged-hash, --enable-keywords, --enable-largefiles and --enable-reduced-depends).
Ideally, ensure INN builds fine with the latest versions of external libraries it has support for (Berkeley DB, blacklistd, Cyrus SASL, libcanlock, LibreSSL, MIT Kerberos v5, OpenSSL, Perl, Python, SQLite, zlib).
Configure INN with all the external libraries it supports, and run
make depend to ensure dependencies are properly defined in all INN
Makefiles. Commit the changes, if appropriate.
Ensure that the source code is properly formatted with the latest versions of
reformatting programs (run make reformat).
If possible, on a news server running the forthcoming release, run the following commands to make sure they do not produce any errors:
cnfsstat -a -v
ctlinnd checkfile
inncheck -a --perm --pedantic
ovdb_stat -klmMtv
ovsqlite-util -A
scanlogs norotate
scanspool -n -v
tdx-util -AMaintain up-to-date information in various files.
Update INSTALL with the list of supported systems.
Update copyright years in LICENSE.
Proof-read and update doc/pod/news.pod. Add the release date when generating the final release.
Be more detailed for a minor release than for a major release. For a major release, also add information on how to upgrade from the last major release, including anything special to be aware of. (Minor releases shouldn't require any special care when upgrading.)
Bump the revision number in doc/FAQ (subject 1.2) so that it could be included in a final release. It should not be changed for a beta or a release candidate (the FAQ is indeed periodically posted to news.software.nntp from the GitHub directory, and should not contain unreleased versions).
If making a major release, the revision numbers of the STABLE series should also be bumped in doc/FAQ at the end of subject 1.2.
Double-check that the library version information in history/Makefile, lib/Makefile, and storage/Makefile has been updated since the previous release. Follow the rules given at <https://www.gnu.org/software/libtool/manual/html_node/Updating-version-info.html>. The commit message usually contains a brief description of API changes, if any, just for the record.
If making a major release, create a new branch in Git named after the
major release. This branch will be used for minor releases based on
that major release and can be done a little while before the .0
release of that major release.
git checkout -b Y.Y
git push --set-upstream origin Y.Y
Then, in that newly created branch, adapt the first paragraph of readme.pod, remove its second paragraph which deals with development versions, and update the URLs to point to the documentation of the new stable version.
Check out a copy of the release branch, and perform the following actions.
Run autogen and configure that are currently necessary to generate
Makefile.global.
Then, run make warnings to generate all necessary files.
Afterwards, run make check-manifest. There shouldn't be any
differences; otherwise, fix the MANIFEST file.
Run make release for a final release, support/mksnapshot BETA b1 for
the first beta version of a new release, or support/mksnapshot RC rc1
for the first release candidate version of a new release.
Generate an MD5 checksum of the release tarball.
md5sum inn-Y.Y.Y.tar.gz > inn-Y.Y.Y.tar.gz.md5
Generate a diff between this release and the previous release if feasible (always for minor releases, possibly not a good idea due to the length of the diff for major releases). You will need the tar file of the previous release for the comparison.
diff -Nurp inn-X.X.X inn-Y.Y.Y > inn-X.X.X-Y.Y.Y.diff
gzip inn-X.X.X-Y.Y.Y.diffFor a testing release, make the resulting tar file, along with its MD5 checksum and the possible diff from the previous release, available for testing into the testing directory on ftp.isc.org and announce its availability on inn-workers. Install it on at least one system and make sure that system runs fine for at least a few days. This is also a good time to send out a draft of the release announcement to inn-workers for proof-reading.
That's all for a testing release. The following steps only concern final releases.
When making the final release, empty the VERSION_EXTRA variable in
Makefile.global.in so that the prerelease value does not appear in the
upcoming Git tag.
Create an annotated signed tag corresponding to the release tarball, using a PGP key declared in the committer's GitHub profile:
git tag Y.Y.Y <commit-hash> -s -m "INN Y.Y.Y release tag"
git push origin Y.Y.Y
Check that it appears as Verified in the GitHub interface, and then publish
a release in GitHub, based on that tag. Include the description from NEWS,
and attach the tarball.
Re-add the prerelease value to the VERSION_EXTRA variable in
Makefile.global.in.
Bump revision numbers to reflect the one of the following release, especially in doc/pod/install.pod and readme.pod for major releases, configure.ac and Makefile.global.in for both minor and major releases. (It is not necessary to bump the revision number if the release is supposed to be the last one in a branch.)
Update milestones in the GitHub bug tracker to reflect the new release.
Make the previously generated release tar file, along with its MD5 checksum and the possible diff from the previous release, available into the public area of ftp.isc.org. Sign the release, creating a .asc file, using:
gpg --detach-sign --armor inn-Y.Y.Y.tar.gz
Also create SHA-1, SHA-256, and SHA-512 files, with sha1sum,
sha256sum, and sha512sum, respectively, and then sign them to create
corresponding .asc files. You don't need to retain the unsigned
checksum files.
Update the inn.tar.gz* links and possibly move older releases off into the OLD directory. Also remove testing versions from the testing directory.
(Currently, this is all done by Russ by updating the files in <https://archives.eyrie.org/software/inn/> and then letting ISC automatically mirror them via rsync within a day.)
Now that the signature of the release has been generated, attach it to the GitHub release.
After ftp.isc.org has correctly mirrored the release, send an announce on inn-announce and in news.software.nntp (with a possible crosspost to news.admin.announce).
The ISC web site does not need being updated as it does not directly link to the release, nor mention the version of the last release. (Just check the information at <https://www.isc.org/othersoftware/#INN> is still available and accurate, though.)
For major releases, ping Russ to update the branch used for the generation of STABLE snapshots.
Ping Russ to update <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/software/inn/> with the latest version information and, for a major release, clone the documentation tree for CURRENT as a new stable documentation tree for the stable release series.
Also ensure the URL redirection of the docs-Y.Y subdirectory corresponding to the next major release points to docs.
Some additional references that may be hard to find and may be of use to people working on INN:
The home page for the IETF NNTP standardization effort, including links to the IETF NNTP working group archives and copies of the latest drafts of the new NNTP standard. The old archived mailing list traffic contains a lot of interesting discussion of why NNTP is the way it is.
A collection of documents about the Usenet article format, including most of the relevant RFCs and Internet-Drafts.
The archives for the USEFOR IETF working group, the working group for the RFC 1036 replacement (the format of Usenet articles), now published as RFC 5536 and RFC 5537.
Forrest Cavalier provides several tools related to earlier versions of INN (2.0 to 2.3.x). His web site is a great source of information about Usenet in general.
A primer on IPv6 with pointers to the appropriate places for more technical details as needed, useful when working on IPv6 support in INN.
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