Website suggestion, 2.8.0-pre4

[Mark Martinec]

/dev/rob0,

> A suggestion (or maybe it is there and I missed it): a files/ or
> download/ directory to make it easier to browse/find files for
> download.

I need to clean that directory before opening it up, contains
plenty of intermediate, experimental and dedicated versions
and is unsightly :)

> Is amavisd-new-2.8.0-pre3.tar.gz still the most recent prerelease
> version?

I just wrapped a amavisd-new-2.8.0-pre4 and added a link to it
to a News section on the amavis web page:

  http://www.ijs.si/software/amavisd/amavisd-new-2.8.0-pre4.tar.gz

  http://www.ijs.si/software/amavisd/release-notes.txt

The 2.8.0-pre4 should be compatible with 2.8.0-pre3 as well as
with 2.7.0.  Compared to -pre3 it contains some bug fixes,
plus a support for 0MQ (a.k.a. ZeroMQ or ZMQ) message passing
library ( www.zeromq.org ).

The 0MQ can replace the use of BerkeleyDB for SNMP monitoring,
for child process status monitoring (nanny), and perhaps logging.
Its main advantage over BerkeleyDB is that it avoids the problem
of lock contention on database updates, which can have significant
impact when a number of busy child processes is large. An additional
benefit is that monitoring can be done on a separate host, with
a potential for easier monitoring of multiple hosts running amavisd.

There are no immediate plans to remove BerkeleyDB, both choices
will exist for some time, but one or the other can be disabled.

Because of some incompatibilities between libzmq 2.1 and 3.1,
with a related rename of a Perl interface module ZeroMQ into a ZMQ,
the amavisd-new-2.8.0-pre4 currently only supports libzmq 3.1
and a newer ZMQ perl module. The ZMQ perl module is currently
a branch on a ZeroMQ perl module, and is currently only available
on github. The on-wire 0MQ protocol has not changed between these
two versions, so monitoring clients can in principle use the older
library, except that 2.1 does not support IPv6, but 3.1 does.

The amavisd package contains two additional programs:
amavisd-hub (should run as a daemon), and amavisd-nanny-zmq.
These do work, but are poorly documented and subject to further
improvements in their ease of use. The 0MQ-based SNMP monitoring
client/snmp-xagent module is still missing.

  Mark