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#!/usr/bin/env perl
#
# Make a fetchmail release.
# Dumps a release notice and diffs as a MIME multipart message 
# in RELEASE_NOTES
#
use POSIX qw(strftime);
$timezone = strftime('%z', localtime) || "-0500";
$tmp = $ENV{TMPDIR} || $ENV{TMP} || $ENV{TEMP} || "/tmp";

$project = "fetchmail";
$svnrepos = "https://decoy.wox.org/svn/$project";
$website = "http://developer.berlios.de/projects/$project";
$mailfrom = "<$project-devel-owner\@lists.berlios.de> (Fetchmail Development Team)";

# parse options
$diffs = 0;
$verbose = 0;
$null = ">/dev/null";
$errnull = "2>/dev/null";
while ($i = shift @ARGV)
{
	if ($i =~ /^(--diffs|-d)$/i)
	{
		$diffs = 1;
		next;
	}

	if ($i =~ /^(--verbose|-v)$/i)
	{
		$verbose = 1;
		$null = "";
		next;
	}

	die "Error: Unknown option: $i\n";
}

# extract version from source
$version=`grep 'AC_INIT' configure.ac`;
$version =~ /AC_INIT\([^,]*,\[?([0-9.rc-]+)\]?\)/;
$version = $1;
die "cannot determine version" unless defined $1;
$tag = "RELEASE_$version";
$tag =~ tr/./-/;

# extract existing tags
open(ID, "-|", "svn", "ls", $svnrepos . "/tags") || die "cannot run svn ls: $!\naborting";
while (<ID>) {
    if (m{^(RELEASE_.*)/}) {
	unshift(@versions, $1);
    }
}
close ID || die "svn ls  failed, aborting";

if ($versions[0] eq $tag) {
    $tag = $versions[0];
    $oldtag = $versions[1];
} else {
    $tag = '<workfile>';
    $oldtag = $versions[0];
}

$ENV{PATH} .= ":./dist-tools:./dist-tools/shipper:.";

print "Building $version release, tag $tag, previous tag $oldtag\n";

if (-d autom4te.cache) {
    system("rm -rf autom4te.cache")
	and die "Failure in removing autom4te.cache";
}

if (system("autoreconf -isv")) {
	die("Failure in regenerating autoconf files\n");
}

if (system("./configure && make clean && make -C po update-po && make clean")) {
	die("Failure in translation-file rebuild\n");
}

print "### Test-building the software...\n";
if (system("./configure && make clean && make distcheck")) {
	die("Compilation failure\n");
}

print "### Building the distribution...\n";
if (system("make dist $null")) {
	die("Distribution-build failure\n");
}

print "### Building the RPMs...\n";
if (system("buildrpms $project-${version}.tar.gz $null")) {
	die("RPM-build failure\n");
}

open(REPORT, ">$tmp/$project.PREAMBLE.$$");

print REPORT <<EOF;
From: $mailfrom
Subject: The $version release of $project is available

The $version release of $project is now available at the usual locations,
including <URL:$website>.

The source archive is available at:
<URL:$website/$project-${version}.tar.gz>

Here are the release notes:

EOF

# Extract the current notes
open(NEWS, "NEWS");
while (<NEWS>) {
    if (/^$project/) {
	print REPORT $_;
	last;
    }
}
while (<NEWS>) {
    if (/^$project/) {
	last;
    }
    print REPORT $_;
}

$oldver = $oldtag;
$oldver =~ tr/-/./;
$oldver =~ s/^RELEASE_//;

if ($diffs) {
	print REPORT "Diffs from the previous ($oldver) release follow as a MIME attachment."
} else {
        print REPORT "By popular demand, diffs from the previous release have been omitted."
}

close(NEWS);

close(REPORT);

if ($tag eq '<workfile>') {
    system("svn diff -r$oldtag        $errnull >$tmp/$project.DIFFS.$$");
} else {
    system("svn diff -r$oldtag -r$tag $errnull >$tmp/$project.DIFFS.$$");
}
print "Diff size:";
system("wc <$tmp/$project.DIFFS.$$");

if ($diffs) {
	system "metasend -b"
	    ." -D '$project-$tag announcement' -m 'text/plain' -e 7bit -f $tmp/$project.PREAMBLE.$$"
	    ." -n -D 'diff between $oldver and $version' -m 'text/plain' -e 7bit -f $tmp/$project.DIFFS.$$"
	    ." -o ANNOUNCE.EMAIL";
} else {
	rename("$tmp/$project.PREAMBLE.$$", "ANNOUNCE.EMAIL");
}
#system("chown esr ANNOUNCE.EMAIL");
#chmod(0700, "ANNOUNCE.EMAIL");

#unlink("$tmp/$project.PREAMBLE.$$");
unlink("$tmp/$project.DIFFS.$$");

print "Building index page...\n";
system("rm -f index.html; indexgen.sh");

if (-r "testsites") {
	print "Building test server list...\n";
	system("rm -f testservers.html; testservers-gen.sh >testservers.html");
}

print "Making activity graph...";
system "growthplot";

print "Done\n";

# makerelease ends here
rd they're after, they'd be able to rip the necessary decoder out of the fetchmail code itself to get it.<P> All .fetchmailrc encryption would do is give a false sense of security to people who don't think very hard.<P> <H2>Truly concurrent queries to multiple hosts</H2> Occasionally I get a request for this on "efficiency" grounds. These people aren't thinking either. True concurrency would do nothing to lessen fetchmail's total IP volume. The best it could possibly do is change the usage profile to shorten the duration of the active part of a poll cycle at the cost of increasing its demand on IP volume per unit time.<P> If one could thread the protocol code so that fetchmail didn't block on waiting for a protocol response, but rather switched to trying to process another host query, one might get an efficiency gain (close to constant loading at the single-host level).<P> Fortunately, I've only seldom seen a server that incurred significant wait time on an individual response. I judge the gain from this not worth the hideous complexity increase it would require in the code.<P> <H2>Multiple concurrent instances of fetchmail</H1> What would be required for this is a per-host semaphore asserted during each poll.<P> The fundamental problem here is how an instance of fetchmail polling host foo can assert that it's doing so in a way visible to all other fetchmails. System V semaphores would be ideal for this purpose, but they're not portable.<P> I've thought about this a lot and roughed up several designs. All are complicated and fragile, with a bunch of the standard problems (what happens if a fetchmail aborts before clearing its semaphore, and how do we recover reliably?)<P>. I'm not satisfied that there's enough functional gain here to pay for the large increase in complexity that adding these semaphores would entail.<P> <H1>Multidrop and alias handling</H1> I decided to add the multidrop support partly because some users were clamoring for it, but mostly because I thought it would shake bugs out of the single-drop code by forcing me to deal with addressing in full generality. And so it proved.<P> There are two important aspects of the features for handling multiple-drop aliases and mailing lists which future hackers should be careful to preserve.<P> <OL> <LI> The logic path for single-recipient mailboxes doesn't involve header parsing or DNS lookups at all. This is important -- it means the code for the most common case can be much simpler and more robust.<P> <LI> The multidrop handing does <EM>not</EM> rely on doing the equivalent of passing the message to sendmail -oem -t. Instead, it explicitly mines members of a specified set of local usernames out of the header.<P> <LI> We do <EM>not</EM> attempt delivery to multidrop mailboxes in the presence of DNS errors. Before each multidrop poll we probe DNS to see if we have a nameserver handy. If not, the poll is skipped. If DNS crashes during a poll, the error return from the next nameserver lookup aborts message delivery and ends the poll. The daemon mode will then quietly spin until DNS comes up again, at which point it will resume delivering mail.<P> </OL> When I designed this support, I was terrified of doing anything that could conceivably cause a mail loop (you should be too). That's why the code as written can only append <EM>local</EM> names (never @-addresses) to the recipients list.<P> The code in mxget.c is nasty, no two ways about it. But it's utterly necessary, there are a lot of MX pointers out there. It really ought to be a (documented!) entry point in the bind library.<P> <H1>DNS error handling</H1> Fetchmail's behavior on DNS errors is to suppress forwarding and deletion of the individual message that each occurs in, leaving it queued on the server for retrieval on a subsequent poll. The assumption is that DNS errors are transient, due to temporary server outages.<P> Unfortunately this means that if a DNS error is permanent a message can be perpetually stuck in the server mailbox. We've had a couple bug reports of this kind due to subtle RFC822 parsing errors in the fetchmail code that resulted in impossible things getting passed to the DNS lookup routines.<P> Alternative ways to handle the problem: ignore DNS errors (treating them as a non-match on the mailserver domain), or forward messages with errors to fetchmail's invoking user in addition to any other recipients. These would fit an assumption that DNS lookup errors are likely to be permanent problems associated with an address.<P> <H1>Lessons learned</H1> <H3>1. Server-side state is essential</H3> The person(s) responsible for removing LAST from POP3 deserve to suffer. Without it, a client has no way to know which messages in a box have been read by other means, such as an MUA running on the server.<P> The POP3 UID feature described in RFC1725 to replace LAST is insufficient. The only problem it solves is tracking which messages have been read <EM>by this client</EM> -- and even that requires tricky, fragile implementation.<P> The underlying lesson is that maintaining accessible server-side `seen' state bits associated with Status headers is indispensible in a Unix/RFC822 mail server protocol. IMAP gets this right.<P> <H3>2. Readable text protocol transactions are a Good Thing</H3> A nice thing about the general class of text-based protocols that SMTP, POP2, POP3, and IMAP belongs to is that client/server transactions are easy to watch and transaction code correspondingly easy to debug. Given a decent layer of socket utility functions (which Carl provided) it's easy to write protocol engines and not hard to show that they're working correctly.<P> This is an advantage not to be despised! Because of it, this project has been interesting and fun -- no serious or persistent bugs, no long hours spent looking for subtle pathologies.<P> <H3>3. IMAP is a Good Thing.</H3> If there were a standard IMAP equivalent of the POP3 APOP validation, POP3 would be completely obsolete.<P> <H3>4. SMTP is the Right Thing</H3> In retrospect it seems clear that this program (and others like it) should have been designed to forward via SMTP from the beginning. This lesson may be applicable to other Unix programs that now call the local MDA/MTA as a program.<P> <H3>5. Syntactic noise can be your friend</H3> The optional `noise' keywords in the rc file syntax started out as a late-night experiment. The English-like syntax they allow is considerably more readable than the traditional terse keyword-value pairs you get when you strip them all out. I think there may be a wider lesson here.<P> <H1>Motivation and validation</H1> It is truly written: the best hacks start out as personal solutions to the author's everyday problems, and spread because the problem turns out to be typical for a large class of users. So it was with Carl Harris and the ancestral popclient, and so with me and fetchmail.<P> It's gratifying that fetchmail has become so popular. Until just before 1.9 I was designing strictly to my own taste. The multi-drop mailbox support and the new --limit option were the first features to go in that I didn't need myself.<P> By 1.9, four months after I started hacking on popclient and a month after the first fetchmail release, there were literally a hundred people on the fetchmail-friends contact list. That's pretty powerful motivation. And they were a good crowd, too, sending fixes and intelligent bug reports in volume. A user population like that is a gift from the gods, and this is my expression of gratitude.<P> The beta testers didn't know it at the time, but they were also the subjects of a sociological experiment. The results are described in my paper, <cite>The Cathedral And The Bazaar</cite>, available on the <a href="http://www.ccil.org/~esr/fetchmail">Fetchmail home page</a>. <H1>Credits</H1> Special thanks go to Carl Harris, who built a good solid code base and then tolerated me hacking it out of recognition. And to Harry Hochheiser, who gave me the idea of the SMTP-forwarding delivery mode.<P> Other significant contributors to the code have included Dave Bodenstab (error.c code and --syslog), George Sipe (--monitor and --interface), Gordon Matzigkeit (netrc.c), Al Longyear (UIDL support), and Nalin Dahyabhai (Kerberos V4 support).<P> <H1>Conclusion</H1> At this point, the fetchmail code appears to be pretty stable. It will probably undergo substantial change only if and when support for a new retrieval protocol or authentication method is added.<P> <H1>Relevant RFCS</H1> Not all of these describe standards explicitly used in fetchmail, but they all shaped the design in one way or another.<P> <DL> <DT>RFC821<DD> SMTP protocol <DT>RFC822<DD> Mail header format <DT>RFC937<DD> Post Office Protocol - Version 2 <DT>RFC974<DD> MX routing <DT>RFC976<DD> UUCP mail format <DT>RFC1081<DD> Post Office Protocol - Version 3 <DT>RFC1123<DD> Host requirements (modifies 821, 822, and 974) <DT>RFC1176<DD> Interactive Mail Access Protocol - Version 2 <DT>RFC1203<DD> Interactive Mail Access Protocol - Version 3 <DT>RFC1225<DD> Post Office Protocol - Version 3 <DT>RFC1344<DD> Implications of MIME for Internet Mail Gateways <DT>RFC1413<DD> Identification server <DT>RFC1428<DD> Transition of Internet Mail from Just-Send-8 to 8-bit SMTP/MIME <DT>RFC1460<DD> Post Office Protocol - Version 3 <DT>RFC1521<DD> MIME: Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions <DT>RFC1869<DD> SMTP Service Extensions (ESMTP spec) <DT>RFC1652<DD> SMTP Service Extension for 8bit-MIMEtransport <DT>RFC1725<DD> Post Office Protocol - Version 3 <DT>RFC1730<DD> Interactive Mail Access Protocol - Version 4 <DT>RFC1731<DD> IMAP4 Authentication Mechanisms <DT>RFC1732<DD> IMAP4 Compatibility With IMAP2 And IMAP2bis <DT>RFC1734<DD> POP3 AUTHentication command <DT>RFC1870<DD> SMTP Service Extension for Message Size Declaration <DT>RFC1891<DD> SMTP Service Extension for Delivery Status Notifications <DT>RFC1892<DD> The Multipart/Report Content Type for the Reporting of Mail System Administrative Messages <DT>RFC1893<DD> Enhanced Mail System Status Codes <DT>RFC1894<DD> An Extensible Message Format for Delivery Status Notifications <DT>RFC1938<DD> A One-Time Password System <DT>RFC1939<DD> Post Office Protocol - Version 3 <DT>RFC1985<DD> SMTP Service Extension for Remote Message Queue Starting <DT>RFC2060<DD> Internet Message Access Protocol - Version 4rev1 <DT>RFC2061<DD> IMAP4 Compatibility With IMAP2bis <DT>RFC2062<DD> Internet Message Access Protocol - Obsolete Syntax </DL> <HR> <table width="100%" cellpadding=0><tr> <td width="30%">Back to <a href="index.html">Fetchmail Home Page</a> <td width="30%" align=center>To <a href="/~esr/sitemap.html">Site Map</a> <td width="30%" align=right>$Date: 1997/10/12 02:44:26 $ </table> <P><ADDRESS>Eric S. Raymond <A HREF="mailto:esr@thyrsus.com">&lt;esr@snark.thyrsus.com&gt;</A></ADDRESS> </BODY> </HTML>