The Musings of Chris Samuel

I’m happy to announce the release of Vacation 1.2.7.0.

This is a complete rebase of the current Vacation code base from the closely related version at http://savannah.nongnu.org/cvs/?group=vacation which had been released under the two clause BSD license (no advertising clause).

This means Vacation finally links legally with the GPL’d GDBM (something I don’t believe people previously realised)!

New features in this version are:

• Vacation will not reply to emails that have the SpamAssassin “X-Spam-Status: Yes” header, thanks to Roberto Piola.
• It uses the OpenBSD secure string handling functions strlcat and strlcpy and use of sprintf has been changed to snprintf to enhance resilience.
• Vacation now uses Eric Raymonds rfc822.c library from his Unix Cookbook for much better parsing RFC2822 email addresses.
• Should (hopefully!) compile on FreeBSD thanks to Marshal Newrock.
• Vacation will silently create its database if it is missing (previously it just crashed!).
• Lots of bug fixes!

This version (still) does not implement support for folded headers for those headers it worries about (From:, Reply-To:, etc), that requires a major reworking of the code that is currently underway in the trunk of the Subversion repository.

Thanks to all those who’ve submitted bug fixes, requested enhancements and sent patches, especially Roberto Piola, Marshal Newrock and Daniel Pittman.

You can download the program from http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=3852&package_id=3820&release_id=611078.

This is the second release candidate that cleans up some cosmetic warnings and fixes a trivial memory leak.

If there are no more bug reports (ha!) then this will get released as 1.2.7.0 in the near future.

As ever you can grab it from here:

https://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=3852&package_id=3820&release_id=607334

Please test and report any problems!

This is the first release candidate for vacation 1.2.7.0 and fixes a segmentation fault for a broken Reply-To: header where there is no address specified.

I’ve also added a KNOWN_BUGS file which lists the fact that vacation currently doesn’t cope with multi-line (wrapped) headers, this is scheduled to be fixed in 1.3 and work is in progress in the SVN trunk for this.

Please test this and report back - if you find any problems please do report them!

Download the release from SourceForge.

This is a minor bugfix release to the 1.2.6 series of Vacation which purely changes the default location for manual page installation to be /usr/share/man rather than the old /usr/man.

Download from SourceForge.

Just a quick update to explain the lack of commits to SVN recently!

I’ve found that Vacation does not handle folded RFC2822 headers correctly (at all in fact) and so I’ve been working on fixing that.

In the process I’ve come across a rather nice dual license BSD/GPL string library called bstrlib (http://bstring.sourceforge.net/) and I’ve started converting Vacation over to it as it both promises to make life easier for me and safer for you (it has far better security than the standard C string functions).

Current state of play is that my new code for reading email headers seems to work in a test harness and I’ve now got to start porting all the old code over to using it.

It’s a non-trivial update but one that I believe is well worth doing.

This release of vacation fixes a brown paper bag bug that broke compilation completely due to a duplicate case statement. Apologies to everyone for not spotting either the bug or the report on the tracker!

This release also fixes the case where a user who had configured a .forward file for vacation but had not created the database with the -i option (or had the database removed for some reason) would find that vacation generated an error. Vacation will now silently create the database if it is missing.

Please report any problems, I think we’re getting very close to a 1.2.7.0 release!

SourceForge has the released sources.

This beta release updates the build process to remove the -m486 flag on non-PPC systems as the distros are already doing this.

This may break backwards compatibility on AMD64/EM64T based systems, the fix is to run vacation -I to reinitialise your database of addresses you have received email from.

The option ‘-i’ has been added as an alias for ‘-I’ and documented in the manual page.

This release includes the Makefile changes from Marshal Newrock to build (hopefully) on FreeBSD with automatic detection of whether it is necessary.

There have been a few other housekeeping changes.

Please report any problems!

SourceForge has both the released sources and the ChangeLog.

This is a minor bugfix release to the 1.2.6 series of Vacation inspired by looking at the sorts of things Linux distros patch for their own usage.

Vacation no longer builds as -m486 by default, though it will build as 32-bit on AMD64/EM64T because GDBM is not 32/64-bit portable and trying to run a 64-bit version against a 32-bit created GDBM causes it to fail and syslog a success message. This is sub-optimal.

The Makefiles CFLAGS handling has been tidied up a fair bit as a consequence and will hopefully make life a little easier for distributors and it no longer tries to strip the vaclook Perl script on install, which was very silly.

Vacation also now accepts the -i option as well as -I to initialise its database.

Download from SourceForge here.

Continue Reading »

Another quick release, this time changing the address parsing for From: and Reply-To: headers to use Eric Raymonds rfc822.c library from his Unix Cookbook and fetchmail rather than the old homebrew code which couldn’t parse many RFC2822 addresses. You can enable the old behaviour by compiling with the -DOLD compiler option (though you probably won’t want to).

It also fixes the bug that broke the -r option, there was a stray “:” in the getopt(3) call that meant it expected an (unnecessary) argument.

There’s a couple of trivial tweaks too.

Please report successful and unsuccessful uses!

Available here.

This new beta may be more on the alpha side of beta as it includes a substantial number of changes to improve security. Rather than using the standard strcpy, strcat, etc it now uses the OpenBSD secure string handling functions strlcat and strlcpy and use of sprintf has been changed to snprintf to try and avoid possible buffer overruns. I’m not actually aware of any attacks but this is quite old code so you never know your luck.

I’ve also changed the implementation of the nsearch() function to use strcasestr() which makes it much simpler.

You can download the release from Sourceforge.

Please test and comment!

Continue Reading »