djbwares version 9

[Jonathan de Boyne Pollard <J.deBoynePollard-newsgroups@NTLWorld.COM>]

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The djbwares package is now up to version 9 .

  *

    http://jdebp.eu./Softwares/djbwares/

  *

    http://jdebp.info./Softwares/djbwares/

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
===========

  *

    http://jdebp.eu./Softwares/djbwares/qmail-patches.html#any-to-cname

  *

    http://jdebp.info./Softwares/djbwares/qmail-patches.html#any-to-cname

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.