[Rpm-announce] Announcing POPT upstream reboot and 1.18 release!

[Panu Matilainen]

At the time of the rpm.org upstream reboot back in 2006 [1], the idea 
was to split out popt from the rpm codebase and then ... something. Only 
we were too busy dealing with rpm itself and popt got left behind. The 
last popt release is from 2010 and about a year ago it's download site 
dropped off the net. People have been prodding us about this for some 
time now, popt being a mandatory dependency of rpm but also used by 
several other prominent OSS projects such as Samba, SSSD and Gnome. So 
after heroic efforts of Neal Gompa to convert the rusty old CVS (anybody 
still remember *that* horror?) repo into a nice shiny git repo, here goes.

 From now on, popt will be maintained under the rpm-software-management 
umbrella at https://github.com/rpm-software-management/popt where bugs 
can be reported and pull-requests submitted, with release tarballs on at
http://ftp.rpm.org/popt/

To accompany the launch there's also a new 1.18 release:

 
https://github.com/rpm-software-management/popt/releases/tag/popt-1.18-release
     http://ftp.rpm.org/popt/releases/popt-1.x/popt-1.18.tar.gz

Much like with rpm itself back in the day, this first release is all 
about collecting existing fixes and cleaning up the codebase, starting 
with the last widely used 1.16 release as the basis. There are no new 
features in this release or in the immediate plans, time will tell where 
this all will lead.

More details in the release notes, but the executive summary of changes 
since 1.16 is:
- fix an ugly and ancient security issue with popt failing to drop 
privileges on alias exec from a SUID/SGID program
- perform rudimentary sanity checks when reading in popt config files
- collect accumulated misc fixes (memleaks etc) from distros
- convert translations to utf-8 encoding
- dust off ten years worth of autotools sediment
- reorganize and clean up the source tree for clarity
- remove the obnoxious splint annotations from the sources

1.18 is supposed to be fully ABI and API compatible with 1.16 to enable 
easy upgrading to a supported version.

On behalf of the rpm-team,

     - Panu -