The djbwares package is now up to version 9 .
This version sees changes to the doco and to the DNS and HTTP
servers.
FreeBSD binaries
================
I plan for this to be the last release with binaries built on
FreeBSD 10. I am going to upgrade the build machine.
Doco
====
All of the manuals are now DocBook XML, and the hodgepodge
admixture of manuals from three sources is gone. A stylesheet is
supplied for reading the manuals directly using a GUI WWW
browser. They can also be read using the console-docbook-xml-viewer
tool from version 1.40 of the nosh toolset.
The long-missing tcp-environ manual is now present.
HTTP servers
============
Hand in hand with the documentation improvement, httpd
now has content types for the .xml and .xhtml
filename extensions.
DNS servers
===========
The ANY query type in the DNS has never meant ALL,
and has never really been useful. Pretty much only one software
even made use of ANY for non-testing purposes. That
was qmail, which I patched not to do so back in 2003.
Although the diagnostic tools still support sending ANY
queries, with one exception, in this release all of the DNS server
softwares now synthesize non-responses, containing an invariant HINFO
resource record set, to ANY queries. The
specialized content DNS servers simply return such responses
straightforwardly, as they do not have to worry about CNAME
chains, which they do not ever construct. The other DNS servers
have to handle CNAME chains.
The general-purpose tinydns and axfrdns
content DNS servers will continue to process CNAME
chains as before, but will return a synthesized HINFO
resource record set at the end of the chain. dnscache
also processes CNAME chains as before, again
returning the chain with a synthesized HINFO
resource record set at the end. It no longer allows ANY
queries as a loophole for retrieving cache contents, and will not
issue ANY queries from its back end.
The diagnostic tool that is the exception is tinydns-get,
whose operation is supposed to exactly replicate what tinydns
does. It, too, now synthesizes non-responses when an ANY
lookup is requested.