NEWS for GNU Alive
See the end for copying conditions.


- 2.0.2 | 2013-09-08

  - distribution now also .tar.lz

    If you have GNU tar, you can use "tar xf" and it will DTRT.
    If not, you can use "lzip -dc TARBALL | tar xf -" to unpack.

  - ‘alive --help’ shows home page / "gethelp" info

    This is for compliance w/ the GNU coding standards:

     (info "(standards) --help")

  - use xdgdirs(1) if $HOME/.alive.d/ unavailable

    If the default config dir $HOME/.alive.d/ is not available, and
    program xdgdirs is, consult the latter to find the config dir.
    For more info, see <http://www.gnuvola.org/software/xdgdirs/>.

  - maintainer tools upgrade
    - gnulib-tool (GNU gnulib 2013-08-26 19:31:15) 0.0.8007-4e1dc
    - automake (GNU automake) 1.13.4
    - guile-baux-tool (Guile-BAUX) 20130831.1504.5dc1ee3


- 2.0.1 | 2012-09-12
  - bug report address updated: bug-alive (at gnu dot org)
  - documentation improved
    - new appendix: GNU Software
    - index expanded
  - maintainer tools upgrade
    - gnulib-tool (GNU gnulib 2012-09-10 20:37:18) 0.0.7617-6418d
    - automake (GNU automake) 1.12.3
    - texinfo.tex now from Gnulib instead of Automake


- 2.0.0 | 2012-08-12

  - licenses upgrade: GPL 3+ / FDL 1.3

    GNU Alive is now released under GPLv3+.  You can redistribute it
    and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public
    License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either
    version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

    The manual is released under GNU FDL 1.3.

  - complete redesign / rewrite

    GNU Alive 2 is a radical simplification; it is now a "periodic
    ping program" only, w/o support for the "auto-login" feature of
    previous releases (nowadays that job is handled best by pppd).
    If you are comfortable typing:

    	ping -i 149 HOST

    at a shell prompt, then you do NOT need GNU Alive 2.  Move on!

  - new dependencies

    - Guile

    - ping(1) that accepts ‘-n -c COUNT’

  - configuration changes

    Configuration for the periodic ping is now done by frobbing
    ‘hosts’ and ‘period’ files under ~/.alive.d, written in a format
    comprising a (very limited) set of sexps.  See manual.

    You can now specify multiple hosts; they are pinged round-robin.
    You can now specify a range for the sleep period; in that case,
    alive sleeps a random number of seconds in the (inclusive) range
    each iteration.

    Configuration changes are now detected at each iteration, so
    that you need not restart the program for changes to take
    effect.  Send SIGALRM to force immediate detection.

  - maintenance changes

    - new maintainer

      GNU Alive is now maintained by Thien-Thi Nguyen, who hopes to
      continue the good work of the previous maintainers.

    - tools upgrade

      GNU gnulib 2012-07-24 21:35:41 (0.0.7541-dbd91)
      GNU Autoconf 2.69
      GNU Automake 1.12.2
      Guile 1.8.7
      SNUGGLE 0.1


- 1.4.0 | 2005-02-22

  - GNU Alive

    The qadsl to GNU Alive transition was made.  New location of
    homepage and downloads are on the gnu.org server, or any of its
    mirrors.

    http://www.gnu.org/software/alive/
    http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/alive/

  - new command-line switch ‘-q’, ‘--quit’

    A new command ‘-q’, ‘--quit’ has been added.  This only quits
    the keep-alive daemon without logging out.

  - FreeBSD build fixes

    The sneak introduction of ‘alloca’ broke the build on several
    non-GNU-LibC systems.  This has been fixed properly and tested
    on FreeBSD Alpha.

  - initial translation effort

    The groundwork for I18n using GNU Gettext has been laid out.
    Thus far only Swedish and C/English is supported.  Other
    translations are welcome.

    Add your language to po/LINGUAS and run "msginit --locale=???"
    from the po directory to generate ???.po, then translate it and
    run it by your translation team, usually <???@li.org>.

  - old config files and PID files reused

    Even though the project has been renamed to GNU Alive and the
    configuraion and PID (lock) files also have been renamed the
    program is still backwards compatible.  The qadsl.conf and
    .qadslrc are detected first, then alive.conf et. al.  The same
    goes for the lock files.

  - bugfixes and minor additions

    The usual minor bugfixes and minor additions in verbosity and
    debug messages, as expected.


- 1.3.3 | 2004-06-29

  - bugfix: config.c

    The actual login part of the daemon was never run even if it was
    activated in the configuration file.  Bad use of ‘strcasecmp’
    led to that part of the config file to be interpreted in the
    straight opposite of the setting.

  - documentation updated

    At least the TeXinfo documentation has been updated.

  - long options implemented

    To support long options ‘getopt_long’ and ‘getopt’ has been made
    a part of the qadsl source tree.  This because long options are
    not available on all platforms, at least not NetBSD.

  - ‘-v’ now is verbose, and ‘-V’ is version

    To more adhere to the style of GNU command line options the
    short options for verbose and version, ‘-V’ and ‘-v’
    respectively, have been switched.  We apologise for the
    confusion this might create.

  - vastly improved logging (/var/log/daemon.log in Debian)

    All calls to ‘syslog’ have been made more informative and clear.
    Now they actually denote "SUCCESSFUL" and "FAILED" to mark the
    login status.  Also, when given ‘-V’ (i.e., ‘--verbose’) that
    switch now propagates properly to the daemon.

    To swamp the logfiles even further another switch has been
    added, ‘--debug’, that replaces the need to rebuild from source
    using ‘--enable-debug’ to configure.  This switch adds a
    ridiculous amount of data to the logfiles and will improve the
    way people can debug their connection setups.

    Also, all state changes are now noticed by the daemon in the
    logfile.

  - forced relogin on already running daemon

    As suggested by Oden Eriksson, qadsl now sends SIGHUP to an
    already started deamon when the client is started with
    ‘--login’.  This forces the daemon to cancel its current delay
    and relogin.

    Forced relogins are noted explicitly in the logfile.

  - cleaned up http.c

    The name-space in http.c has been updated even further from the
    old code.  It has been changed to ‘http_server_init’,
    ‘http_server_login’, etc.

    A lot of the code has also seen face lifts and general
    simplificaions and some long overdue documentation.

  - socket leak fix

    Mandrake RPM maintainer, Oden Eriksson, reported too many open
    sockets from a long running qadsl process.  Turned out to be a
    socket leak that occurred when bailing out early on error
    detection.


- 1.3.2 | 2004-02-17

  - ugly bug in .conf file parser fixed

    A really ugly bug in the .conf file parser made it impossible to
    parse the new style .conf file format.

  - supported architectures

    The list of supported arhitectures and dsitributions has grown.
    qadsl-1.3.2 has been tested on:

    Slackware 9.1 (intel)
    Mandrake 9.2 (intel)
    Debian GNU/Linux (intel/Sarge)
    Debian GNU/Hurd (intel/Sid)
    NetBSD 1.6 (intel)
    FreeBSD 5.1 (alpha)


- 1.3.1 | 2004-01-31

  - "make dist" actually builds a proper distribution

    The last source release 1.3.0 did not build, due to various
    files being missing from the distribution.

  - NetBSD fixes

    All qadsl releases from 1.3.1 onwards should now build properly
    on NetBSD.  Courtesy of jakov.

  - GNU/Hurd fixes

    All qadsl releases from 1.3.1 onwards should now build properly
    on GNU/Hurd.  Thanks to Gürkan Sengün for providing a testing
    machine, http://hurd.she.kicks-ass.org:8084/


- 1.3.0 | 2004-01-21

  -  Major rewrite of most of the code

    Most of the code has been restructured and rewritten to simplify
    the next big step - extension - qadsl is going places.

  - .conf file parser in CFG

    Bison and Flex has been called upon to do their magic on the
    .conf file format.  This has enabled a much more free and
    extensible file format.

  - HTTP handling improved

    State management has been improved to be more fault tolerant.
    As well as also being cleaned up immensely.

    This means more stability, no more sudden logouts just because
    your ISP temporarily disabled logins.  We now patiently wait for
    the login server (or your network card or whatever) to be
    reactivated.

  - Debian patches included

    Just like we have a qadsl.spec file (for .rpm's) we also include
    the Debian scripts to build .deb files.

  - failover lock file support

    If PID_FILE does not exist or cannot be opened for reading /
    writing we need to find out other ways to play.

  - more stubborn when login fails

    qadsl does not exit(1) at every possible juncture anymore.


- etc 
	Local Variables:
	mode: outline
	outline-regexp: "\\([ ][ ]\\)*- "
	End:

Copyright (C) 2012, 2013 Thien-Thi Nguyen

Copying and distribution of this file, with or without modification,
are permitted provided the copyright notice and this notice are preserved.
