i summon one kim

I announced tcsh 6.14 today. The major “new feature” for me in this release is working UTF-8 support. Anyone using multibyte character sets should be much happier now. It has been great having a number of people work on the code — there are over 70 fixes in this release.

I have been practising release engineering for tcsh by cutting the last 3 developer test versions. I have automated the release procedure a bit more to minimize the chance for errors from having to type in detailed commands repeatedly. Let’s see if I can push out another release a bit closer to my desired goal of every 6 months.

I have also installed an issue tracker to make it easier to produce change logs and make sure that issues are not falling through the cracks. I hope it will also provide a searchable long-term memory on past decisions on what will get included in tcsh and when.

Naturally right after announcing the release I updated the pgksrc package for tcsh, so you can install the package right now by updating your pkgsrc tree.

I finally got around to upgrading Apachce::Gallery to version 0.9.1. The upgrade is relatively easy: just edit your templates to change variable expansions from $FOO to {$FOO}. If you are using a copyright image, you now have the option of using a text string in the config (rendered using a TrueType font of your choice). It’s worth glancing through the manual (use perldoc Apache::Gallery to see the manual).

If you are having a problem with new pictures not showing up, check the version of imlib2 you have installed. I had to downgrade to 1.1.2nb3 to be able to generate cached images again. There is possibly some glitch between p5-Image-Imlib2 and the new imlib2 1.2.0 code. I’ve filed PR pkg/29054 as a reminder.

I’ve upgraded the leafnode package to version 1.10.7 in order to get Xref: headers in the XOVER responses. There was a bug since 1.9.50 that inadvertently caused Xref: to be dropped out when creating the overview database.

If you think it is no more deja vu when reading an article again, this could be the reason. At least nn depends exclusively on overview data for the Xref: header contents when determining cross-posts you have already read.

Another long-standing nuisance resolved: the files in the Mailman package end up with incorrect permissions, resulting in a non-functional installation. Running check_perms -f will report the problem and fix the permissions. (See PR pkg/24041 for details.)

After some more learning about the bsd.pkg.install.mk machinery, I’ve committed a fix that makes sure files are installed correctly.

I’ve been getting segmentation violation deaths in the Postfix smtp client for quite some time. I don’t remember which upgrade introduced them — especially because the problem only exhibited itself on the busiest mail server I have, relay.gw.com. It handles between 50,000 and 100,000 transactions daily.

Yesterday I dug into the topic with the help of Google. Many of the threads discussing the “killed by signal 11” problem suggested removing TLS or SASL or both from Postfix, which was not an option for me. I also didn’t think they would be the problem, because both have been deployed before the errors started. (more…)

I was surprised to see a new version of the old IceS client — after all, it wasn’t supposedly developed anymore. The reason I’ve packaged it is that it supports streaming of MP3 data. My Audiotron doesn’t handle Ogg Vorbis, which is the only format supported by the new IceS client.

So, to stay current on the version, I’ve upgraded the ices-mp3 package to version 0.4. It adds FLAC support, actually, so that might be a reason to upgrade. Note that it transcodes the data, though, so you’ll need the CPU power to decode FLAC and encode it to MP3 (using LAME).