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  14    <H1>[IRCServices] Services 5.1pre0 released</H1>
  15     <B>Andrew Church</B>
  16     <A HREF="mailto:ircservices%40ircservices.za.net?Subject=%5BIRCServices%5D%20Services%205.1pre0%20released&In-Reply-To="
  17        TITLE="[IRCServices] Services 5.1pre0 released">achurch at achurch.org
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  19     <I>Sun May  6 17:18:19 PDT 2007</I>
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  34 <PRE>     After close to three years of work, Services 5.1 has finally reached
  35 beta status, and Services 5.1pre0 has now been released.  It can be
  36 downloaded from the usual sites:
  37
  38 <A HREF="http://www.ircservices.za.net/download/testing/">http://www.ircservices.za.net/download/testing/</A>   (Japan)
  39 <A HREF="ftp://ftp.esper.net/ircservices/testing/">ftp://ftp.esper.net/ircservices/testing/</A>          (Western USA)
  40
  41 75e0b3c432239bd392fc3834cadc28b0  ircservices-5.1pre0.tar.gz
  42 8e32697bee2282ce98dd14df6bbe2150  ircservices-5.1pre0-1.i386.rpm
  43 2ba786a9bf6e175887a926d219286844  ircservices_5.1pre0-1_i386.deb
  44
  45 The mirrors should have it shortly.
  46
  47      While not a stable release, I am announcing this version here (and
  48 will announce future beta versions on this list as well) for two reasons.
  49 One is that, while I am hesitant to label it &quot;stable&quot; before it has seen
  50 widespread testing, the code itself is pretty solid, and should be usable
  51 in production environments.  I will, of course, respond to bugs as quickly
  52 as I can, but I'd like to recommend that those of you currently using 5.0
  53 upgrade to 5.1 at your convenience, even before the stable release.  I will
  54 also continue to support version 5.0 until 5.1 reaches stable status.
  55
  56      The second, and more important, reason for posting the announcement
  57 to this list is that I intend version 5.1 to be the last version of IRC
  58 Services, at least under my care.  While I don't consider Services
  59 &quot;complete&quot;--software development is a neverending task, and in any case
  60 users' needs change over time--I do believe that it's time for me to move
  61 on to other things.  In fact, I already devote a fair amount of my time
  62 outside of work to other software development projects (such as the
  63 audio/video tool &quot;transcode&quot;, for those who are familiar with it), and I
  64 have other hobbies which I haven't been able to pursue as much as I'd
  65 like.  I've also found that I personally use IRC very infrequently these
  66 days, and that has inevitably lessened my interest in continuing Services
  67 development as well.
  68
  69      I certainly don't believe that IRC itself is a dead or obsolete
  70 protocol, and I've spent the better part of the past year writing a
  71 detailed technical manual for Services, found in the &quot;docs/tech&quot; directory
  72 of the distribution, so that other developers can pick up as easily as
  73 possible where I'm leaving off.  Even after the release of 5.1.0, I will
  74 continue to monitor the mailing lists and maintain Services 5.1 to the
  75 extent of fixing bugs and making other reasonably small changes.  In terms
  76 of major improvements and additions, however, 5.1.0 will be the &quot;final
  77 form&quot; of Services for IRC Networks.
  78
  79      For this reason, I'd like to encourage discussion of beta versions of
  80 5.1 on this list, rather than on the coding list as has been done in the
  81 past.  I'll continue to accept new feature suggestions until the release of
  82 5.1.0, so if there is something you'd like to see added, feel free to bring
  83 it up on this list.  (However, I will as always exercise my discretion in
  84 choosing whether a suggested feature should be added, as described in FAQ
  85 Z.5; I'm not going to bloat the program just because it's the last version.
  86 The module system is available as always for third parties to add anything
  87 I decide to leave out, and it has been improved for 5.1--in particular,
  88 modules can now save data to persistent storage without any modification of
  89 the core Services code.)
  90
  91      In addition to feature suggestions, I'd also like to hear about
  92 anything in the Services user interface that seems awkward or unintuitive,
  93 whether new for 5.1 or present since previous versions.  After over ten
  94 years of development, I know Services inside and out, so things that seem
  95 obvious to me may not be so to newcomers.  If there are any questions you
  96 frequently get from new users, that probably means something needs to be
  97 changed, so let me know.
  98
  99      Technical issues should be directed to the coding list, as always.  In
 100 particular, if there are any issues with packaging Services for use with an
 101 operating system distribution, I'd like to hear about them so that they can
 102 be corrected.  (I personally use a home-built Linux system, and as such I
 103 haven't kept close track of changes in how various OSes and distributions
 104 arrange their filesystems.)
 105
 106      I realize that this &quot;end-of-life&quot; announcement for Services may come
 107 as a surprise to some, and for that I apologize.  As I mentioned earlier, I
 108 will continue to support Services for some time to come (my current thought
 109 is for two to three years after the release of 5.1.0); however, I did want
 110 to provide advance warning of my future intentions.  Thank you all for your
 111 support over the years.
 112
 113   --Andrew Church
 114     <A HREF="http://lists.ircservices.za.net/mailman/listinfo/ircservices">achurch at achurch.org</A>
 115     <A HREF="http://achurch.org/">http://achurch.org/</A>
 116
 117 -------------------------
 118 What's New in version 5.1
 119 -------------------------
 120 Database handling, the one aspect of Services which has remained
 121 essentially unchanged since version 1.0, has finally undergone a fairly
 122 significant redesign.  Rather than using specialized data load and save
 123 routines tailored for the core Services pseudoclients, Services now
 124 implements a generic database table system, which has the dual benefits of
 125 separating the data storage system from the rest of Services (allowing
 126 alternative storage methods to be implemented easily) and allowing third-
 127 party modules and extensions to create their own non-volatile databases
 128 without resorting to custom load/save routines.  The default database file
 129 format has also been changed to be more flexible and error-resilient than
 130 the old format (which admittedly isn't saying much); see the &quot;upgrading&quot;
 131 section of the manual for instructions on switching your databases to the
 132 new format.
 133
 134 The often-criticized channel memo system has also been redesigned for this
 135 version.  Instead of storing channel memos with the channel, memos are now
 136 sent to the founder and all users on the channel with a particular access
 137 level (by default level 100, or SOP level).  These memos are distinguished
 138 from ordinary memos by text that says &quot;(for #channel)&quot; when reading the
 139 memo.  As a result of this change, users will be notified about new channel
 140 memos in the same way as ordinary user-to-user memos.
 141
 142 NOTICE: When loading databases from version 5.0 or earlier, all channel
 143         memos will be deleted.
 144
 145 Encryption support has also been improved.  Encryption is no longer an
 146 all-or-nothing affair; the encryption method is stored with each password,
 147 so that enabling or disabling encryption will have no effect on passwords
 148 that were previously set.  The &quot;encryption/unix-crypt&quot; module has been
 149 added, allowing the use of the Unix crypt() function to encrypt passwords.
 150
 151 The NickServ and ChanServ SENDPASS commands added in version 5.0 have been
 152 removed in favor of the new NickServ REAUTH command.  This command
 153 generates an authentication code which the user can use once to identify to
 154 their nickname in place of the password, and then change the password as
 155 needed.  Channel passwords can always be changed by the founder after
 156 nickname identification, rendering ChanServ SENDPASS unnecessary.
 157
 158 Long LIST/VIEW responses are now handled more cleanly.  Except for NickServ
 159 ACCESS LIST (since nickname access lists are generally short) and MemoServ
 160 LIST (since memos are numbered), every list now includes an &quot;end of list&quot;
 161 message indicating both the number of entries displayed and the total
 162 number of entries in the list; the configuration directive ListMax,
 163 replacing NSListMax and CSListMax, sets the maximum number of entries
 164 displayed for any of these commands.  It is also possible to skip a certain
 165 number of entries by adding a &quot;+NNN&quot; after the command, allowing all of the
 166 entries in a long list to be viewed bit by bit.
 167
 168 At the development level, handling of module compilation has been improved,
 169 allowing third-party modules to be simply &quot;dropped in&quot; without requiring
 170 changes to Makefiles or other Services distribution files.  An extension
 171 interface has been added to Services' multilingual support as well,
 172 allowing modules to add their own language strings and load their own
 173 language files.
 174
 175 Other changes:
 176   + Command aliases can now be added for NickServ, ChanServ, and MemoServ
 177         commands via the NSAlias, CSAlias, and MSAlias directives.
 178   + Notices are now sent to the user when sending of a mail authentication
 179         code message fails.  (However, errors after the message has been
 180         handed off to the mail server cannot be detected.)
 181   + A new configuration directive, RejectEmail, now allows selected E-mail
 182         addresses to be rejected by NickServ and ChanServ commands.
 183   + NickServ INFO will now indicate when a nickname's user is using a
 184         different linked nickname if the nickname group's PRIVATE option
 185         is not set.
 186   + NickServ now has a RESTOREMAIL command (in the nickserv/mail-auth
 187         module), which allows a user to restore their nickname's last
 188         authenticated E-mail address if, for example, SET EMAIL is used
 189         with an incorrect address.
 190   + NickServ SET/UNSET by Services administrators for others' nicknames is
 191         now done by putting a &quot;!&quot; before the nick to avoid ambiguity; for
 192         example, &quot;SET !nick NOEXPIRE ON&quot; instead of &quot;SET nick NOEXPIRE ON&quot;.
 193   + ChanServ REGISTER and SET PASSWORD now check for and disallow easily
 194         guessable passwords.
 195   + ChanServ ACCESS now includes a LISTLEVEL subcommand to list access
 196         entries with a given level or within a given level range.
 197   + ChanServ AKICK and MemoServ IGNORE now support matching by IP address
 198         (on servers which support client IP address information).
 199   + ChanServ OP, VOICE, and similar commands can now be used with multiple
 200         nicknames.
 201   + MemoServ now has a RENUMBER command to remove &quot;holes&quot; in the memo
 202         number sequence.
 203   + MemoServ FORWARD now sends all selected memos in a single E-mail
 204         message, rather than sending each memo in a separate message.
 205   + OperServ AKILL and related commands now have a CHECK subcommand which
 206         can be used to find all masks that match a given user/hostname.
 207   + SQlines are no longer applied to IRC operators during Services startup
 208         or netjoins if the IRC protocol in use supports sending user modes
 209         with the NICK message.  This includes the bahamut, hybrid,
 210         inspircd, monkey, ptlink, ratbox, solid-ircd, trircd, and unreal
 211         protocol modules.
 212   + The ignore system has been redesigned, and now keeps better track of
 213         how much load each user is putting on Services.  The ignorance
 214         threshold can be fine-tuned via the configuration file.
 215   + A new &quot;unsorted list&quot; mode has been added to improve Services'
 216         performance on large networks.  By giving the -no-sorted-list
 217         option to the configure script, Services will not try to keep
 218         nicknames and channels in alphabetical order; this means that
 219         commands such as NickServ LIST will no longer return nicknames in
 220         order, but Services will run significantly faster.
 221   + Support has been added for the InspIRCd, ircd-ratbox, and solid-ircd
 222         IRC servers.
 223   + Unreal's NICKCHARS protocol option, allowing non-ASCII characters in
 224         nicknames, is now supported.
 225   * ChanServ DROP now behaves like NickServ DROP: dropping a channel now
 226         requires the channel password to be entered with the DROP command,
 227         and DROPCHAN has been added as a separate command for Services
 228         administrators to drop arbitrary channels.
 229   * The ChanServ ACCESS, XOP, and AKICK commands no longer use entry
 230         numbers; the DEL and LIST subcommands now work with nicknames
 231         (hostmasks for the AKICK command) only.
 232   * The binary distributions (RPM and Debian packages) now install into
 233         /opt/ircservices and /var/opt/ircservices, rather than /usr/sbin
 234         and /usr/lib/ircservices.
 235   * Tab characters are no longer used (or allowed) in the source code.
 236   - The deprecated nickserv/oldlink module, which provided support for the
 237         format of the LINK command used in version 4 of Services, has been
 238         removed.
 239   - Support for &quot;modeless channels&quot;, with names of the form &quot;+name&quot;, has
 240         been removed.  (Support for registering such channels was removed
 241         in version 5.0.0; this version removes the special handling for
 242         such channels in other parts of the program.)
 243   - Support for the &quot;channel owner&quot; mode present in the PTlink (+a),
 244         trircd (+u), and Unreal (+q) IRC servers has been removed, as there
 245         are too many differing opinions on its proper use.
 246   - Language support for Italian and Portuguese has been removed, due to
 247         the lack of volunteers to maintain them.
 248   - Support for old versions of GCC (anything before GCC 3.2) has been
 249         removed.
 250 Configuration file changes:
 251   + IncludeFile has been added to allow configuration directives to be
 252         split up into multiple files, and may be used in both
 253         ircservices.conf and modules.conf.
 254   + LoadLanguageText (ircservices.conf) has been added to allow replacement
 255         of Services text strings at runtime.
 256   + RejectEmail (ircservices.conf) has been added to allow rejection of
 257         selected E-mail addresses.
 258   + NSAlias (module nickserv/main), CSAlias (module chanserv/main), and
 259         MSAlias (module memoserv/main) have been added to allow creation of
 260         command aliases.
 261   + NSSetEmailDelay (module nickserv/main) has been added to enforce a
 262         delay between consecutive uses of the SET EMAIL command, thereby
 263         reducing the potential for sending mailbombs.
 264   + CSDefModeLock (module chanserv/main) has been added to allow the
 265         default mode lock for newly registered channels to be changed.
 266   + CSSkipModeRCheck (module chanserv/main) has been added to allow the
 267         check of a nickname's registration status at channel join time
 268         (used to kick unregistered nicknames from channels locked +R) to
 269         be skipped.
 270   + MSExpireDelay (module memoserv/main) has been added to allow memo
 271         expiration to be delayed until a certain time after the memo is
 272         first read.
 273   + MaxMessages (module mail/main) has been added to allow a limit to be
 274         placed on the total number of messages in transit.
 275   * ListMax (ircservices.conf) has been added in place of NSListMax and
 276         CSListMask to set a limit on the number of entries displayed for
 277         all LIST-like commands.
 278   * WallAdminPrivs (ircservices.conf) has been added in place of
 279         WallGetpass and WallSetpass to cause a WALLOPS/GLOBOPS to be sent
 280         on all NickServ and ChanServ commands that use Services
 281         administrator privileges.
 282   * The database name configuration directives (NickServDB, ChanServDB,
 283         etc.) have been moved from the various pseudoclient module sections
 284         to the database/version4 module section, and now explicitly specify
 285         filenames.
 286   - The nickserv/sendpass and chanserv/sendpass modules (and therefore
 287         their respective configuration sections) have been removed.
 288   - CSAutokickReason (module chanserv/main) has been removed, as the
 289         built-in reason prefix &quot;AKICK by &lt;nick&gt;&quot; makes it unnecessary.
 290   - MSExpireUnread (module memoserv/main) has been removed, since it
 291         results in silent data loss.
 292   - MSNotifyAll (module memoserv/main) has been removed, since it is
 293         required for channel memos.  MemoServ will now always behave as if
 294         MSNotifyAll was set.
 295   - MaxSockets (module mail/smtp) has been removed, since MaxMessages now
 296         performs the same function.
 297 </PRE>
 298
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