I have finally decided to take over maintainership of mod_auth_mysql, fixed most of the open bugs and uploaded a new version into the Debian archive. Once it has passed NEW it should show up in Debian unstable. Hopefully, it will make it into lenny as well, so that we can provide a version in the next stable Debian release again.

One and a half years ago the former maintainer announced that he has no desire to maintain the package anymore. Since he doesn't use Apache as well that sounds quite logical. Due to a bug that was marked release critical the package has been removed from etch and thus hasn't been released with the current Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 stable.

The package provides an easy way to set up web authentication for certain website locations using account information stored in a MySQL database. This way it was quite easy to use the account data from bugzilla, Mantis, osCommerce etc. for static web pages as well without the need to set up a new account system.

However, since the package has been removed from etch and later from unstable as well, the only way to accomplish this goal is to use and configure »pam_mysql«. For a while I have simply compiled the package from unstable on an etch system which worked as a charm. After it was removed there as well and I was in need again, I decided to find out my options.

In theory »mod_auth_mysql« is deprecated and superseded by »mod_auth_dbd« and »mod_dbd«. The latter package should be compiled with MySQL support and should provide a general database interface for Apache modules – similar to Perl's DBI or PHP's DB layer. Unfortunately Bug#405773 describes a technical problem which makes this approach fail. I'm told chances are good that it will be resolved in the future.

Because taking over a package and simply re-uploading the last version is lame I took a look at the bug tracking system first and fixed eight (+1) bugs before uploading the package. The »MySQL« encryption method works again and doesn't produce a segmentation fault. There's a new encryption method »Apache« that uses the same routines Apache uses for »htpasswd« files. Port specification and boolean options have also been corrected and all Keywords are now available in both spellings to reduce config confusion.

I've finally took the time to release the new version 0.5 of newmail, the terminal notifier for incoming mail. This release comprises several improvements to the internal mail header parsing. All corrections and improvements together result in better header recognition and reporting.

An updated version of the newmail package will be released soon. This will mostly be a bugfix release that addresses several oddities that have been discovered during the past two years.

I'd be glad those who are using this program could give it a try and report back new problems that have crept in - success reports are also welcome, of course. The current development codebase is accessible via anonymous CVS.

Every once in a while some people complain about the implied need to read articles on Planet Debian who don't have the desire to graze the website on their own. There are RSS feeds but this requires the use of RSS feed readers.

Most of these people are subscribed to several mailing lists in order to keep up with the development within the Debian project. For those people I have created a mailing list several years ago that distributes articles from Planet Debian via mail. This way, Planet Debian is just similar to a mailing list without threads and more people can keep up with it.

Those who are interested execute the following command:

echo subscribe ticker-planetdebian | mail majordomo@lists.infodrom.org

Yesterday, I finally got around releasing the new version of cgilib, the lightweight CGI library. This version adds support for uploading files, the alternative content encoding multipart/form-data and the semicolon as record delimiter.