NEWS for GNU Alive
See the end for copying conditions.



- 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.

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Copyright (C) 2012 Thien-Thi Nguyen

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