Hacking INN

    This file is for people who are interested in making modifications to
    INN.  Normal users can safely skip reading it.  It is intended primarily
    as a guide, resource, and accumulation of tips for maintainers and
    contributors, and secondarily as documentation of some of INN's
    internals.

    First of all, if you plan on working on INN source, please start from
    the current development tree.  There may be significant changes from the
    previous full release, so starting from development sources will make it
    considerably easier to integrate your work.  You can check out the
    current development tree using Subversion from:

        <http://inn.eyrie.org/svn/>

    or view it with Trac source browser at:

        <https://inn.eyrie.org/trac/browser/>

    You will need autoconf 2.64 or later to use the development tree.  After
    checking out the tree, run "./autogen" to generate the necessary
    autoconf files.

    Nightly snapshots can be found at:

        <ftp://ftp.isc.org/isc/inn/snapshots/>

Configuring and Portability

    All INN code should be written expecting ANSI C and POSIX.  There is no
    need to attempt to support pre-ANSI compilers, and ANSI-only features
    such as <stdarg.h>, string concatenation, "#elif", and token pasting may
    be used freely.  So far as possible, INN is written to attempt to be
    portable to any system new enough that someone is likely to want to run
    a news server on it, but whenever possible this portability should be
    provided by checking for standard behavior in configure and supplying
    replacements for standard functions that are missing.

    When there is a conflict between ANSI C and C99, INN code should be
    written expecting C99 and autoconf used to patch up the differences.

    Try to avoid using "#ifdef" and the like in the middle of code as much
    as possible.  Instead, try to isolate the necessary portability bits and
    include them in libinn or at least in conditional macros separate from
    the code.  Trying to read code littered with conditional compilation
    directives is much more difficult.

    The shell script configure at the top level of the source tree is
    generated by autoconf from configure.ac and the additional macros in the
    m4 directory, and include/config.h.in is generated by autoheader from
    configure.ac.  At configure time, configure generates include/config.h
    and several other files based on options it was given and what it
    discovers about the target system.

    All modifications to configure should instead be made to configure.ac. 
    The autoconf manual (available using "info autoconf" if you have
    autoconf and the GNU info utilities installed on your system) is a
    valuable reference when making any modifications.

    To regenerate configure, just run "autoconf".  To regenerate
    include/config.h.in, run "autoheader".  Alternately, to regenerate both,
    you can run "./autogen".  Please don't include patches to either
    configure or include/config.h.in when sending patches to INN; instead,
    note in your patch that those files must be regenerated.  These (and all
    other) generated files should not be checked into Subversion.

    At the time of this writing, autoconf 2.64 or later is required.

    The supporting files for autoconf are in the support subdirectory,
    including the files config.guess and config.sub to determine the system
    name and ltmain.sh for libtool support.  The latter file comes from the
    Debian package of Libtool, available from
    <https://packages.debian.org/libtool> (ltmain.sh is in the
    libltdl/config subdirectory created after building the package with for
    instance debuild); the canonical version of the former two are available
    from <ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/config/> (which currently redirects to
    <http://git.savannah.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=config.git;a=tree>).  In
    addition, m4/libtool.m4 and a few others m4 files are just a copy of the
    corresponding files in the libltdl/m4 subdirectory of the Debian package
    of the libtool distribution.  (Using libtool without using automake
    requires a few odd hacks.)  New versions should be checked in
    periodically when available.  There are no INN-specific modifications to
    those files except for ltmain.sh which recognizes the additional -B flag
    that INN's install-sh script uses.  This script should also be updated
    at the same time from
    <http://git.savannah.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=automake.git;a=tree;f=lib>; it
    similarly contains local modifications in order to support the
    additional -B flag, as well as a few other changes mentioned in a
    comment at the beginning of the file.

Autobuilds

    Automatic build logs on several platforms are available at
    <http://usenet.trigofacile.com/autobuild/inn/>.

Documentation

    INN's documentation is currently somewhat in a state of flux.  Much of
    the documentation is still in the form of man pages written directly in
    nroff.  Some parts of the documentation have been rewritten in POD; that
    documentation can be found in doc/pod.  The canonical source for most of
    the text documentation, including README, INSTALL, NEWS, and this file,
    is also POD.

    If you're modifying some part of INN's documentation and see that it has
    a POD version in doc/pod, you should make the modifications to the POD
    source and then regenerate the derived files.  For a quick introduction
    to POD, see the perlpod(1) man page on your system (it should be
    installed if you have Perl installed).

    When writing new documentation, write in whatever format you care to; if
    necessary, we can always convert it to POD or whatever else we want to
    use.  Having the documentation exist in *some* form is more important
    than what language you write it in.  If you don't have a preference,
    however, we prefer new documentation to be in POD.

    If you use POD or regenerate POD documentation, please install something
    close to the latest versions of the POD processing utilities to avoid
    changes to the documentation depending on who generated it last.  You
    can find the latest version on CPAN (ftp.perl.org or another mirror) in
    modules/by-module/Pod.  You'll need PodParser (for versions of Perl
    before 5.6.1; 5.6.1 and later come with a recent enough version) and the
    latest version of podlators.  For versions of Perl earlier than 5.005,
    you'll also need "File::Spec" in modules/by-module/File.

    podlators 1.25 or later will build INN's documentation without
    significant changes from the versions that are checked into the
    repository.

    There are makefile rules in doc/pod/Makefile to build all of the
    documentation whose master form is POD; if you add additional
    documentation, please add a rule there as well.  Documentation should be
    generated by cd'ing to doc/pod and typing "make file" where "file" is
    the relative path to the documentation file.  This will get all of the
    various flags right for pod2text or pod2man.

Error Handling

    INN has a set of generic error handling routines that should be used as
    much as possible so that the same syntax can be used for reporting
    errors everywhere in INN.  The six basic functions are notice,
    sysnotice, warn, syswarn, die, and sysdie; notice prints or logs an
    informative message, warn prints or logs a warning, and die does the
    same and then exits the current program.  The sys* versions add a colon,
    a space, and the value of strerror(errno) to the end of the message, and
    should be used to report failing system calls.

    All of the actual error reporting is done via error handlers, and a
    program can register its own handlers in addition to or instead of the
    default one.  The default error handler (message_log_stderr) prints to
    stderr, prepending the value of message_program_name if it's set to
    something other than NULL.  Several other error handlers are available,
    particularly including ones that use syslog.  See include/inn/messages.h
    for all of the available options.

    There is a different set of error handlers for notice/sysnotice,
    warn/syswarn, and die/sysdie.  To set them, make calls like:

        message_handlers_warn(1, message_log_stderr);
        message_handlers_die(2, message_log_stderr, message_log_syslog_err);

    The first argument is the number of handlers, and the remaining
    arguments are pointers to functions taking an int (the length of the
    formatted message), a const char * (the format), a va_list (the
    arguments), and an int that's 0 if warn or die was called and equal to
    the value of errno if syswarn or sysdie was called.  The length of the
    formatted message is obtained by calling vsnprintf with the provided
    format and arguments, and therefore is reliable to use as the size of a
    buffer to malloc to hold the result of formatting the message provided
    that vsnprintf is used to format it (warning:  the system vsprintf may
    produce more output under some circumstances, so always use vsnprintf).

    The error handler can do anything it wishes; each error handler is
    called in the sequence given.  Error handlers shouldn't call warn or die
    unless great caution is taken to prevent infinite recursion.  Also be
    aware that sysdie is called if malloc fails in xmalloc, so if the error
    handler needs to allocate memory, it must not use xmalloc or a related
    function to do so and it must not call die to report failure.  The
    default syslog handlers report memory allocation failure to stderr and
    exit.

    Finally, die and sysdie support an additional handler (the external
    variable message_fatal_cleanup) that's called immediate before exiting,
    takes no arguments, and returns an int which is used as the argument for
    exit.  It can do any necessary global cleanup, call abort instead to
    generate a core dump or the like.

    The advantage of using this system everywhere in INN is that library
    code can use notice, warn, and die to report messages and errors, and
    each calling program can set up the handlers as appropriate to make sure
    the errors go to the right place.  The default handler is fine for
    interactive programs; for programs that run from interactive scripts,
    adding something like:

        message_program_name = "program";

    to the beginning of main (where program is the name of the program) will
    make it easier to figure out which program the script calls is failing. 
    For programs that may also be called non-interactively, like rnews, one
    may want to set up handlers like:

        message_handlers_notice(2, message_log_stdout, message_log_syslog_info);
        message_handlers_warn(2, message_log_stderr, message_log_syslog_warning);
        message_handlers_die(2, message_log_stderr, message_log_syslog_err);

    Finally, for daemons and other non-interactive programs, one may want to
    do:

        message_handlers_notice(1, message_log_syslog_info);
        message_handlers_warn(1, message_log_syslog_warning);
        message_handlers_die(1, message_log_syslog_err);

    to report errors only via syslog.  (Note that if you use syslog error
    handlers, the program should call openlog first thing to make sure they
    are logged with the right facility.)

    For historical reasons, error messages that are fatal to the news
    subsystem are logged at the LOG_CRIT priority, and therefore die in innd
    should use message_log_syslog_crit.  This seems like priority inflation
    and may change in the future to message_log_syslog_err.

Test Suite

    The test suite for INN is located in the tests directory and is just
    getting started.  The test suite consists of a set of programs listed in
    tests/TESTS and the scaffolding in the runtests program.

    Adding new tests is very straightforward and very flexible.  Just write
    a program that tests some part of INN, put it in a directory under tests
    named after the part of INN it's testing, and have it output first a
    line containing the count of test cases in that file, and then for each
    test a line saying "ok n" or "not ok n" where "n" is the test case
    number.  (If a test is skipped for some reason, such as a test of an
    optional feature that wasn't compiled into INN, the test program should
    output "ok n # skip".)  Add any rules necessary to build the test to
    tests/Makefile (note that for simplicity it doesn't recurse into
    subdirectories) and make sure it creates an executable ending in .t. 
    Then add the name of the test to tests/TESTS, without the .t ending.

    For C tests, you probably want to use the functions in tests/tap/basic.c
    (prototypes in tests/tap/basic.h) to handle all of the output.  For
    shell script tests, tests/tap/libtap.sh contains helpful shell
    functions.  See the existing tests for some hints about how to write new
    tests, as well as the tests/README guide.

    One naming convention:  to distinguish more easily between for example
    lib/error.c (the implementation) and tests/lib/error-t.c (the test
    suite), we add -t to the end of the test file names.  So
    tests/lib/error-t.c is the source that compiles into an executable
    tests/lib/error.t which is run by putting a line in tests/TESTS of just
    "lib/error".

    Note that tests don't have to be written in C; in fact, lib/xmalloc.t is
    just a shell script (that calls a supporting C program).  Tests can be
    written in shell or Perl (but other languages should be avoided because
    someone who wants to run the test suite may not have it) and just have
    to follow the above output conventions.

    Additions to the test suite, no matter how simple, are very welcome.

    Running the test suite is done with:

        make check

    A single test can be run with verbose ouput via:

        tests/runtests -o <name-of-test>

    Using runtests ensures that necessary environment variables are set up.

Makefiles

    All INN makefiles include Makefile.global at the top level, and only
    that makefile is a configure substitution target.  This has the
    disadvantage that configure's normal support for building in a tree
    outside of the source tree doesn't work, but it has the significant
    advantage of making configure run much faster and allowing one to run
    "make" in any subdirectory and pick up all the definitions and settings
    from the top level configuration.

    All INN makefiles should also set "$(top)" to be the path to the top of
    the build directory (usually relative).  This path is used to find
    various programs like fixscript and libtool so that the same macros (set
    in Makefile.global) can be used all over INN.

    The format of INN's makefiles is mostly standardized; the best examples
    of the format are probably frontends/Makefile and backends/Makefile, at
    least for directories with lots of separate programs.  The "ALL"
    variable holds all the files that should be generated, "EXTRA" those
    additional files that were generated by configure, and "SOURCES" the C
    source files for generating tag information.

    There are a set of standard installation commands defined in make
    variables by Makefile.global, and these should be used for all file
    installations.  See the comment blocks in Makefile.global.in for
    information on what commands are available and when they should be used.
    There are also variables set for each of the installation directories
    that INN uses, for use in building the list of installed paths to files.

    Each subdirectory makefile should have the targets "all" (the default),
    "clean", "clobber"/"distclean", "install", and "profiled".  The
    "profiled" target generates a profiling version of the programs
    (although this hasn't been tested much).  These rules should be present
    and empty in those directories where they don't apply.

    Be sure to test compiling with both static and dynamic libraries and
    make sure that all the libtool support works correctly.  All linking
    steps, and the compile steps for all library source, should be done
    through "$(LIBCC)" and "$(LIBLD)" (which will be set as appropriate in
    Makefile.global).

Scripts

    INN comes with and installs a large number of different scripts, both
    Bourne shell and Perl, and also comes with support for Tcl scripts
    (although it doesn't come with any).  Shell variables containing both
    configure-time information and configuration information from inn.conf
    are set by the innshellvars support libraries, so the only
    system-specific configuration that should have to be done is fixing the
    right path to the interpreter and adding a line to load the appropriate
    innshellvars.

    support/fixscript, built by configure, does this.  It takes a .in file
    and generates the final script (removing the .in) by fixing the path to
    the interpreter on the first line and replacing the second line,
    whatever it is, with code to load the innshellvars appropriate for that
    interpreter.  (If invoked with -i, it just fixes the interpreter path.)

    Scripts should use innshellvars (via fixscript) to get the right path
    and the right variables whenever possible, rather than having configure
    substitute values in them.  Any values needed at run-time should instead
    be available from all of the different innshellvars.

    As for Perl, the "INN::Config" module has the same features as
    innshellvars.pl (only kept for compatibility reasons with old scripts
    not shipped with INN); however, it can be safely used with warnings on
    in Perl scripts.

    See the existing scripts for examples of how this is done.

Include Files

    Include files relevant to all of INN, or relevant to the two libraries
    built as part of INN (the utility libinn library and the libstorage
    library that contains all storage and overview functions) are found in
    the include directory; other include files relevant only to a portion of
    INN are found in the relevant directory.

    Practically all INN source files will start with:

        #include "config.h"
        #include "clibrary.h"

    The first picks up all defines generated by autoconf and is necessary
    for types that may not be present on all systems (*uid_t*, *pid_t*,
    *size_t*, *uint32_t*, and the like).  It therefore should be included
    before any other headers that use those types, as well as to get general
    configuration information.  It also includes inn/defines.h and
    inn/options.h, which pick up additional support macros and compile-time
    configuration.

    The second is portably equivalent to:

        #include <sys/types.h>
        #include <stdarg.h>
        #include <stdio.h>
        #include <stdlib.h>
        #include <stddef.h>
        #include <stdint.h>
        #include <string.h>
        #include <unistd.h>

    except that it doesn't include headers that are missing on a given
    system, replaces functions not found on the system with the INN
    equivalents, provides macros that INN assumes are available but which
    weren't found, and defines some additional portability things.  Even if
    this is more headers than the source file actually needs, it's generally
    better to just include clibrary.h rather than trying to duplicate the
    autoconf-driven hackery that it does to do things portably.  The primary
    exception is for source files in lib that only define a single function
    and are used for portability; those may want to include only config.h so
    that they can be easily used in other projects that use autoconf. 
    config.h is a fairly standard header name for this purpose.

    clibrary.h does also include config.h, but it's somewhat poor form to
    rely on this; it's better to explicitly list the header dependencies for
    the benefit of someone else reading the code.

    There are portable wrappers around several header files that have known
    portability traps or that need some fixing up on some platforms.  Look
    in include/portable and familiarize yourself with them and use them
    where appropriate.

    Another frequently included header file is inn/libinn.h, which among
    other things defines xmalloc(), xrealloc(), xstrdup(), and xcalloc(),
    which are checked versions of the standard memory allocation routines
    that terminate the program if the memory allocation fails.  These should
    generally always be used instead of the regular C versions. 
    inn/libinn.h also provides various other utility functions that are
    frequently used.

    inn/paths.h includes a wide variety of paths determined at configure
    time, both default paths to various parts of INN and paths to programs. 
    Don't just use the default paths, though, if they're also configurable
    in inn.conf; instead, call innconf_read() and use the global *innconf*
    structure.

    Other files in include are interfaces to particular bits of INN library
    functionality or are used for other purposes; see the comments in each
    file.

    Eventually, the header files will be separated into installed header
    files and uninstalled header files; the latter are those headers that
    are used only for compiling INN and aren't useful for users of INN's
    libraries (such as clibrary.h).  All of the installed headers will live
    in include/inn and be installed in a subdirectory named inn in the
    configured include directory.  This conversion is still in progress.

    When writing header files, remember that C reserves all identifiers
    beginning with two underscores and all identifiers beginning with an
    underscore and a capital letter for the use of the implementation; don't
    use any identifiers with names like that.  Additionally, any identifier
    beginning with an underscore and a lower-case letter is reserved in file
    scope, which means that such identifiers can only be used by INN for the
    name of structure members or function arguments in function prototypes.

    Try to pay attention to the impact of a header file on the program
    namespace, particularly for installed header files in include/inn.  All
    symbols defined by a header file should ideally begin with "INN_",
    "inn_", or some other unique prefix indicating the subsystem that symbol
    is part of, to avoid accidental conflicts with symbols defined by the
    program that uses that header file.

Libraries

    INN includes three shared libraries, in lib, storage, and history. 
    Whenever any of the source to those libraries is modified, the library
    version information must be updated at the top of the Makefile in that
    directory.  Follow the instructions in the Libtool manual under
    Versioning / Updating version info, with the exception that, contrary to
    point 2, it's useful to those running snapshots to update the version
    information more frequently than for each public release.  Remember that
    the version information has to be updated to allow recovery from a "make
    update" command.

Coding Style

    INN has quite a variety of coding styles intermixed.  As with all
    programs, it's preferrable when making minor modifications to keep the
    coding style of the code you're modifying.  In INN, that will vary by
    file.  (Over time we're trying to standardize on one coding style, so
    changing the region you worked on to fit the general coding style is
    also acceptable).

    If you're writing a substantial new piece of code, the prevailing
    "standard" INN coding style is the following:

    *  Write in regular ANSI C whenever possible.  Use the normal ANSI and
       POSIX constructs and use autoconf or portability wrappers to fix
       things up beforehand so that the code itself can read like regular
       ANSI or POSIX code.  Code should be written so that it works as
       expected on a modern platform and is fixed up with portability tricks
       for older platforms, not the other way around.  You may assume an
       ANSI C compiler.

       Try to use const wherever appropriate.  Don't use register; modern
       compilers will do as good of a job as you will in choosing what to
       put into a register.  Don't bother with restrict (at least yet).

    *  Use string handling functions that take counts for the size of the
       buffer whenever possible.  This means using snprintf in preference to
       sprintf and using strlcpy and strlcat in preference to strcpy and
       strcat.  Also, use strlcpy and strlcat instead of strncpy and
       strncat, as it is much easier to audit uses of the former than the
       latter.  strlcpy is like strncpy except that it always nul-terminates
       and doesn't fill the rest of the buffer with nuls, making it more
       efficient.  strlcat is like strncat except that it always
       nul-terminates and it takes the total size of the buffer as its third
       argument rather than just the amount of space left.  All of these
       functions are guaranteed to be available; there are replacements in
       lib for systems that don't have them.

       If you have to use a string copying routine that doesn't
       nul-terminate, use memcpy instead.  Avoid introducing any uses of
       strcpy, strcat, strncpy, or strncat so that we can use grep to find
       dangerous usages and switch them to better functions.

    *  Avoid "#ifdef" and friends whenever possible.  Particularly avoid
       using them in the middle of code blocks.  Try to hide all portability
       preprocessor magic in header files or in portability code in lib. 
       When something just has to be done two completely different ways
       depending on the platform or compile options or the like, try to
       abstract that functionality out into a generic function and provide
       two separate implementations using "#ifdef"; then the main code can
       just call that function.

       If you do have to use preprocessor defines, note that if you always
       define them to either 0 or 1 (never use "#define" without a second
       argument), you can use the preprocessor define in a regular if
       statement rather than using "#if" or "#ifdef".  Make use of this
       instead of "#ifdef" when possible, since that way the compiler will
       still syntax-check the other branch for you and it makes it far
       easier to convert the code to use a run-time check if necessary. 
       (Unfortunately, this trick can't be used if one branch may call
       functions unavailable on a particular platform.)

    *  Avoid uses of fixed-width buffers except in performance-critical
       code, as it's harder to be sure that such code is correct and it
       tends to be less flexible later on.  If you need a reusable,
       resizable memory buffer, one is provided in lib/buffer.c.

    *  Avoid uses of static variables whenever possible, particularly in
       libraries, because it interferes with making the code re-entrant down
       the road and makes it harder to follow what's going on.  Similarly,
       avoid using global variables whenever possible, and if they are
       required, try to wrap them into structures that could later be
       changed into arguments to the affected functions.

    *  Use a roughly BSD indentation style but with four-space indents. 
       This means no space before the parenthesis around function arguments,
       open brace on the same line as if/while/for, and close and open brace
       on the same line as else.

    *  Introductory comments for functions or files are generally written
       as:

           /*
           **  Introductory comment.
           */

       Other multiline comments in the source are generally written as:

           /* This is a
              multiline comment. */

       Comments before functions saying what they do are nice to have.  In
       general, the RCS/SVN "Id" tag is on the first line of each source
       file since it's useful to know when a file was last modified.

    *  Checks for NULL pointers are preferrably written out explicitly; in
       other words, use:

           if (p != NULL)

       rather than:

           if (p)

       to make it clearer what the code is assuming.

    *  It's better to always put the body of an "if" statement on a separate
       line, even if it's only a single line.  In other words, write:

           if (p != NULL)
               return p;

       and not:

           if (p != NULL) return p;

       This is in part for a practical reason:  some code coverage analysis
       tools like purecov will count the second example above as a single
       line and won't notice if the condition always evaluates the same way.

    *  Plain structs make perfectly reasonable abstract data types; it's not
       necessary to typedef the struct to something else.  Structs are
       actually very useful for opaque data structures, since you can
       predeclare them and then manipulate pointers to them without ever
       having to know what the contents look like.  Please try to avoid
       typedefs except for function pointers or other extremely confusing
       data types, or for data types where we really gain some significant
       data abstraction from hiding the underlying data type.  Also avoid
       using the "_t" suffix for any type; all types ending in "_t" are
       reserved by POSIX.  For typedefs of function pointer types, a suffix
       of "_func" usually works.

       This style point is currently widely violated inside of INN itself;
       INN originally made extensive use of typedefs.

    *  When noting something that should be improved later, add a comment
       containing "FIXME:" so that one can easily grep for such comments.

    INN's indentation style roughly corresponds to that produced by GNU
    indent 2.2.6 with the following options:

        -bad -bap -nsob -fca -lc78 -cd41 -cp1 -br -ce -cdw -cli0 -ss -npcs
        -ncs -di1 -nbc -psl -brs -i4 -ci4 -lp -ts8 -nut -ip5 -lps -l78 -bbo
        -hnl

    Unfortunately, indent currently doesn't get everything right (it has
    problems with spacing around struct pointer arguments in functions,
    wants to put in a space between a dereference of a function pointer and
    the arguments to the called function, misidentifies some macro calls as
    being type declarations, and fouls up long but simple case statements). 
    It would be excellent if someday we could just run all of INN's code
    through indent routinely to enforce a consistant coding style, but
    indent isn't quite ready for that.

    For users of emacs cc-mode, use the "bsd" style but with:

        (setq c-basic-offset 4)

    Finally, if possible, please don't use tabs in source files, since they
    can expand differently in different environments.  In particular, please
    try not to use the mix of tabs and spaces that is the default in emacs. 
    If you use emacs to edit INN code, you may want to put:

        ; Use only spaces when indenting or centering, no tabs.
        (setq-default indent-tabs-mode nil)

    in your ~/.emacs file.

    Note that this is only a rough guideline and the maintainers aren't
    style nazis; we're more interested in your code contribution than in how
    you write it.

Making a Release

    This is a checklist that INN maintainers should go through when
    preparing a new release of INN.

    1.  Update the files shipped with INN, and that are maintained by
        external projects.

        * Make sure that support/config.guess, support/config.sub,
          support/install-sh, support/ltmain.sh and libtool m4 files
          (libtool.m4, ltoptions.m4, ltsugar.m4, ltversion.m4 and
          lt~obsolete.m4) are the latest versions.  See the instructions in
          "Configuring and Portability" for details on how to update these
          files.

        * Make sure that the latest upstream version of the C TAP Harness
          package is used for the test suite driver.  It is available at
          <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/software/c-tap-harness/>, and can be
          easily synchronized with the script support/getc-tap-harness; just
          run it, have a look at the resulting changes in INN source code
          and, if everything seems all right, commit these changes.

          Parts specific to INN should be kept during an update (especially
          sections relative to LIBTEST_NEW_FORMAT because the test suite has
          not yet been fully updated to use the new format of C TAP
          Harness).

        * Make sure that the latest upstream version of the files maintained
          in the rra-c-util package that INN uses are the ones shipped with
          the release.  These files are available at
          <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/software/rra-c-util/> and can be
          easily synchronized with the script support/getrra-c-util; just
          run it, have a look at the resulting changes in INN source code
          and, if everything seems all right, commit these changes.

        * Make sure that samples/control.ctl and samples/nocem.ctl are in
          sync with the master version at
          <ftp://ftp.isc.org/pub/usenet/CONFIG/control.ctl> and
          <http://rosalind.home.xs4all.nl/nocemreg/nocemreg.html>.

    2.  Update copyright years in LICENSE.

    3.  Update doc/pod/news.pod and regenerate NEWS.  Be more detailed for a
        minor release than for a major release.  For a major release, also
        add information on how to upgrade from the last major release,
        including anything special to be aware of.  (Minor releases
        shouldn't require any special care when upgrading.)

    4.  Bump the revision number in doc/FAQ (subject 1.2) so that it could
        be included in a final release.  It should not be changed for a beta
        or a release candidate.

        If making a major release, the revision numbers of the STABLE series
        should also be bumped at the end of subject 1.2.

    5.  Double-check that the version information in lib/Makefile,
        storage/Makefile, and history/Makefile has been updated if there has
        been any change in the library sources since the previous release.

    6.  If making a major release, branch the source tree by creating a new
        directory under branches in Subversion named after the major
        release.  This branch will be used for minor releases based on that
        major release and can be done a little while before the .0 release
        of that major release.

            svn copy -r ZZZZ -m "Branch Y.Y.0 release." \
                file:///srv/svn/inn/trunk file:///srv/svn/inn/branches/Y.Y

        Then, in that newly created branch, remove the first paragraph in
        doc/pod/readme.pod which deals with development versions.

    7.  Check out a copy of the release branch.  It's currently necessary to
        run "autogen" and "configure" to generate Makefile.global.  Then,
        run "make warnings" to generate all necessary files.  Afterwards,
        run "make check-manifest".  There shouldn't be any differences;
        otherwise, fix the MANIFEST file.

    8.  Run "make release" for a final release, "support/mksnapshot BETA b1"
        for the first beta version of a new release, or "support/mksnapshot
        RC rc1" for the first release candidate version of a new release. 
        Note that you need to have a copy of svn2cl from
        <http://arthurdejong.org/svn2cl/> to do this; at least version 0.7
        is required.  Start the ChangeLog at the time of the previous
        release.  (Eventually, the script will be smart enough to do this
        for you.)

        Check that the ChangeLog file is correct; otherwise, regenerate it
        or manually edit it.  Then run again "make release" or any other
        command you used.

    9.  Generate an MD5 checksum of the release tarball.

            md5sum inn-Y.Y.Y.tar.gz > inn-Y.Y.Y.tar.gz.md5

    10. Generate a diff between this release and the previous release if
        feasible (always for minor releases, possibly not a good idea due to
        the length of the diff for major releases).  You will need the tar
        file of the previous release for the comparison.

            diff -Nurp inn-X.X.X inn-Y.Y.Y > inn-X.X.X-Y.Y.Y.diff
            gzip inn-X.X.X-Y.Y.Y.diff

    11. Make the resulting tar file, along with its MD5 checksum and the
        possible diff from the previous release, available for testing in
        the testing directory on ftp.isc.org and announce its availability
        on inn-workers.  Install it on at least one system and make sure
        that system runs fine for at least a few days.  This is also a good
        time to send out a draft of the release announcement to inn-workers
        for proof-reading.

    12. Move the release into the public area of the ftp site and update the
        inn.tar.gz link.  Also put the diff and the MD5 checksum on the ftp
        site and update the inn.tar.gz.md5 link.  Sign the release (ASC,
        SHA-1, SHA-256 and SHA-512) and update the inn.tar.gz.asc link. 
        Possibly move older releases off into the OLD directory.  Contact
        the ISC folks to push the release to ftp.isc.org and to update the
        ISC web site (the relevant contact is "web-request" instead of
        "webmaster").

    13. After the ISC web site has been updated with links towards the new
        release, send an announce on inn-announce and in news.software.nntp
        (with a possible crosspost to news.admin.announce).

    14. Tag the checked-out tree that was used for generating the release
        with a release tag by copying it to tags in Subversion.

            svn copy -r ZZZZ -m "Tag Y.Y.Y release." \
                file:///srv/svn/inn/branches/Y.Y file:///srv/svn/inn/tags/Y.Y.Y

    15. Bump revision numbers to reflect the one of the following release,
        especially in doc/pod/install.pod, doc/pod/readme.pod and TODO for
        major releases, configure.ac and Makefile.global.in for both minor
        and major releases.  The release versions in the Trac wiki should
        also be updated.

    16. For major releases, update the branch used for the generation of
        STABLE snapshots.

References

    Some additional references that may be hard to find and may be of use to
    people working on INN:

    <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/nntp/>
        The home page for the IETF NNTP standardization effort, including
        links to the IETF NNTP working group archives and copies of the
        latest drafts of the new NNTP standard.  The old archived mailing
        list traffic contains a lot of interesting discussion of why NNTP is
        the way it is.

    <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/usefor/>
        A collection of documents about the Usenet article format, including
        most of the relevant RFCs and Internet-Drafts.

    <http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/usefor/current/maillist.html>
        The archives for the USEFOR IETF working group, the working group
        for the RFC 1036 replacement (the format of Usenet articles), now
        published as RFC 5536 and RFC 5537.

    <http://www.mibsoftware.com/userkt/inn/dev/>
        Forrest Cavalier provides several tools for following INN
        development at this page and elsewhere in the Usenet RKT.  Under
        here is a web-accessible checked-out copy of the current INN source
        tree and pointers to how to use CVSup.  However, please note that
        INN development now uses Subversion.

    <http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-lutchann-ipv6-intro-00>
        A primer on IPv6 with pointers to the appropriate places for more
        technical details as needed, useful when working on IPv6 support in
        INN.

    $Id: hacking.pod 9942 2015-09-08 19:49:55Z iulius $

