[Dnsmasq-discuss] Announce: dnsmasq-2.51rc1

Simon Kelley simon at thekelleys.org.uk
Thu Oct 1 13:19:02 BST 2009


Matthias Andree wrote:
> Am 29.09.2009, 22:08 Uhr, schrieb Simon Kelley <simon at thekelleys.org.uk>:
> 
>> The development branch of dnsmasq has amassed quite a few changes, going
>> back 3 months in some cases: most of the work was done before the 2.50
>> security-only release. I think it's time therefore to make a new
>> release, and I'm making a first release-candidate available at
>>
>> http://www.thekelleys.org.uk/dnsmasq/release-candidates/dnsmasq-2.51rc1.tar.gz 
>>
>> http://www.thekelleys.org.uk/dnsmasq/release-candidates/dnsmasq-2.51rc1.tar.lzma 
>>
>>
>> Please test this, and/or translate it, as appropriate. (Translators,
>> drop me a note if you're working and I'll hold off a final release until
>> you're done.)
>>
>> version 2.51
>>             Add support for internationalised DNS. Non-ASCII characters
>>             in domain names found in /etc/hosts, /etc/ethers and
>>             /etc/dnsmasq.conf will be correctly handled by translation
>>             to punycode, as specified in RFC3490. This function is only
>>             available if dnsmasq is compiled with internationalisation
>>             support, and adds a dependency on GNU libidn. Without i18n
>>             support, dnsmasq continues to be compilable with just
>>             standard tools. Thanks to Yves Dorfsman for the
>>             suggestion.
> 
> Some findings of the -rc1:
> 
> - During build, I18N - which currently comprises IDN _and_ NLS as an 
> inseparable union - only works with GNU make, not with BSD's make.

Where is the problem? I ensured that the build works with BSD make, but 
only for the non-IDN build, it would be good to fix that.

> 
> - IDN needs pkg-config (just like DBus also needs pkg-config) - there 
> are some GNUisms, but I don't have good/efficiently implemented ideas to 
> avoid these. GNU make is readily available on most systems though.
> 
> These two requirements are not documented, please consider documenting 
> them.
> 
> - Unless I'm missing some links in setup.html, the whole build is 
> massively underdocumented, no mention of DBus or i18n anywhere, and 
> setup.html doesn't appear to be linked from doc.html and vice versa. I'd 
> suggest to add the whole COPT=-Dfoo system to setup.html, too, or at 
> least point to src/config.h and mention how to most efficiently set 
> these options.
> 

A valid criticism, I guess that since almost everyone installs dnsmasq 
from an OS or distribution package these days, such documenation has a 
much smaller audience (and therefore priority) than user-level 
documentation. It is sadly lacking.



> - I wonder how dnsmasq will figure out the proper character set for 
> these files -- or will it just assume UTF-8? Older systems might use 
> some ISO-8859-* variant. (Sorry, no time to read source now.)

It calls idna_to_ascii_lz() which uses the current locale.

from "man idna_to_ascii_lz"

DESCRIPTION
        Convert  domain  name  in  the locale’s encoding to ASCII 
string.
        The domain name may contain several labels, separated by
        dots.  The output buffer must be deallocated by the caller.

> 
> - The "all-i18n" target creates the .mo files under /src which I find 
> counterintuitive.

I can't remember why it's done like that. It must have made sense at the 
time!

> 
> - The German translation is - with 17/313 messages - so incomplete it's 
> not worth shipping. I don't have sufficient time to do it on short 
> notice though, so I'll not try.

Any volunteers on the list?

Cheers,

Simon.



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