Beta releases

From: Kent Landfield <kent_at_hypermail-project.org>
Date: Mon, 14 Sep 1998 11:31:50 -0500 (CDT)
Message-Id: <199809141631.LAA03626_at_landfield.com>

Hi all.

I was hoping that we were really near the end of the beta cycle. Now I'm not so sure. There is one major hurdle to making Hypermail rock solid and that is its use of static buffers in parsing. The verion that I have now is better than the last beta but it still can crash if someone sends a line that exceeds the static memory buffers. This is not a problem for most uses but every once in a while you will get a mail message from a strange mailer that thinks everything in the body is one long stream. Hypermail then merrily craters in. Besides messing up the archive, nasty things could be done with this and it could become a security issue at some sites depending on the modes, ownerships of the archives.

I was really hoping that we could release the next beta as the final beta. The reality is that would not be wise. I want the released version to be solid and not have to deal with a thousand bug reports about the same core problem.

With that in mind I am going to release another beta RSN and then start ripping out the static buffer and convert them to dynamicly allocated ones. When that is done then I think I can be confident that we will have a rock solid tool.

Just a heads up...

-- 
Kent Landfield                        Phone: 1-817-545-2502             
Email: kent_at_landfield.com             http://www.landfield.com/
Email: kent_at_nfr.net                   http://www.nfr.net/
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Received on Mon 14 Sep 1998 06:36:29 PM GMT