[fcron] / doc / en / changes.sgml

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   <sect1 id="changes">
      <title>Changes</title>

      <itemizedlist>
         <title>From version 3.1.2 to 3.1.3</title>
            <listitem>
               <para>Fixed compilation on Solaris 10, and fixed fcrondyn authentication without a password on that platform.</para>
            </listitem>
            <listitem>
               <para>Fixed bug where LONG_MAX could potentially be used in functions like localtime(), which is too big for localtime().  This was unlikely to happen unless there was another problem in the first place.</para>
            </listitem>
            <listitem>
               <para>fcrondyn -x no longer adds null characters at the end of the output.  This would cause problems if the output was piped to something as grep.  Thanks Dimitri Semitsoglou-Tsiapos for pointing this out.</para>
            </listitem>
            <listitem>
               <para>Fixed minor bug in fcronsighup resulting in log errors about closing the signal file</para>
            </listitem>
            <listitem>
               <para>fcrondyn no longer crashes when receiving an EOF when using readline (thanks Wade Carpenter for the patch)</para>
            </listitem>
      </itemizedlist>

      <itemizedlist>
         <title>From version 3.1.1 to 3.1.2</title>
            <listitem>
               <para>bug fix: fixed fcron crash bug when using fcrondyn</para>
            </listitem>
            <listitem>
               <para>bug fix: the configure option --without-sendmail was not working correctly.</para>
            </listitem>
            <listitem>
               <para>bug fix: inline runas wouldn't work with Vixie-cron style shortcut lines.</para>
            </listitem>
            <listitem>
               <para>bug fix: fixed bug in the code to log to a file.</para>
            </listitem>
            <listitem>
               <para>systemd: fixed the installation on systems using systemd, and also don't kill jobs when killing fcron.</para>
            </listitem>
            <listitem>
               <para>Made file closures more robust to prevent bugs difficult to troubleshoot to creep in.</para>
            </listitem>
      </itemizedlist>

      <itemizedlist>
         <title>From version 3.1.0 to 3.1.1</title>
            <listitem>
               <para>Added readline support for fcrondyn</para>
            </listitem>
            <listitem>
               <para>tweaked 'make indent' options and applied</para>
            </listitem>
            <listitem>
               <para>Fcron can now log to a file (without syslog) - thanks Matthew Signorini.</para>
            </listitem>
            <listitem>
               <para>fixed fcrontab edition of *ly lines (hourly, daily, etc)</para>
            </listitem>
            <listitem>
               <para>fixed fcron crashes when noticenotrun was triggered</para>
            </listitem>
      </itemizedlist>
      <itemizedlist>
         <title>From version 3.0.6 to 3.1.0</title>
         <listitem>
            <para>Vixie cron compatibility: added options @reboot, @daily, @hourly, etc. Also added more generic options runatreboot, rebootreset and runonce.</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>Pass fcrondyn client credentials through the socket when possible so as the user doesn't need to type his password when using fcrondyn.</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>added audit (libaudit) support</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>Better validation of string arguments of fcrontab options. In particular for timezones, previously a space could be added at the beginning or the end of the timezone with no warning, and this led fcron to use an unexpected timezone, which could cause confusion.</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>Allow tasks to run every seconds</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>don't inherit fcron's environment when running a job but build the environment from scratch (cleaner, and this is what Vixie cron does)</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>fcron now sets the email headers X-Cron-Env and Auto-Submitted (as described in RFC 3834).</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>email encoding: fcron now sets the email headers Content-Type and Content-Transfer-Encoding. They can be controlled by setting the CONTENT_TYPE and CONTENT_TRANSFER_ENCODING variables in fcrontabs.</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>Added systemd service definition (thank you Reiner)</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>Allow Makefile parallelism (e.g. make -j 4)</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>bug fix: fcrontab: don't alert about invalid character when correcting fcrontab twice</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>bug fix: fixed free_safe() function (replaced by macro).</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>bug fix: configure script: usage of sendmail couldn't be disabled</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>bug fix: fixed a potential (unlikely) 1 byte overflow in strncat() in socket.c</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>Quite a lot of code clean-up and refactoring -- e.g. implemented generic unordred list for lavgq / exeq.</para>
         </listitem>
      </itemizedlist>
      <itemizedlist>
         <title>From version 3.0.5 to 3.0.6</title>
         <listitem>
            <para>Fixed bug preventing normal user from running fcrontab -l if fcron's uid!=gid</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>Fixed fcrontab's PAM initialization when working on the systab user.</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>Added check_system_crontabs.sh which is to replace the less portable check_system_crontabs.bash.</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>Added option -c to check_system_crontabs.sh to specify a fcron.conf file to use</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>Fixed Makefile bug preventing installation when building from a different folder than the sources (wrong fcron.conf path)</para>
         </listitem>
      </itemizedlist>

      <itemizedlist>
         <title>From version 3.0.4 to 3.0.5</title>
         <listitem>
            <para>Security issue: fixed security issue that allowed malicious user to read any file readable by group 'fcron' (in particular fcron's config files and the fcrontabs of non-root users). On systems without seteuid() (i.e. quite exotic systems) then the bug is harder to exploit but any file could be read.</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>Improved general security of fcrontab and fcrondyn by dropping more privileges.</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>Work on portability (aix, hpux, irix, tru64 unix, solaris). Thanks Peter O'Gorman for his patch!</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>Patched startup script to make it more compliant to the LSB.</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>Increased maximum number of fcrontab entries from 256 to 1024.</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>bug fix: if fcron could not fork() to run a job, then the job would still appear to be running until fcron is restarted (thanks Alexander Y. Fomichev for noticing this bug).</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>bug fix: fcrontab used to accept MAXENTRIES+1 fcrontab entries</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>chdir to /tmp before executing the editor (as some editor needs to be able to read information on the current folder).</para>
         </listitem>
      </itemizedlist>

      <itemizedlist>
         <title>From version 3.0.3 to 3.0.4</title>
         <listitem>
            <para>Initialize the random number generator with some values specific to the machine so as two fcron started exactly at the same time on two different machines run their random jobs at different time. This is useful for clusters for instance.</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>Added option erroronlymail so as the output of a job is emailed only when the job exited with a non-zero status.</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>Bug fix: in certain conditions, jobs could be executed outside their interval of execution when using option random on %-lines.</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>Fixed bug which prevented the pid of the job to be written to the (grand-)parent process. This was not a major issue but would prevent fcrondyn from working well with the concerned jobs. This bug was caused by a close() function applied twice on a file descriptor, which would trigger the bug in some rare occasions (only one affected linux system reported).</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>Fixed bug which would stop fcron from running any job any more on the affected system and until fcron was restarted if the bug above occured.</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>Cleaned-up the closures of file descriptors (check for errors, etc).</para>
         </listitem>
      </itemizedlist>

      <itemizedlist>
         <title>From version 3.0.3-rc1 to 3.0.3</title>
         <listitem>
            <para>The configure script now check that the make command is GNU make (which is required to build fcron).</para>
            <para>Bug fix: better handling of getpwnam() errors (we cannot rely on errno to spot an error). This was causing problems for AIX for instance.</para>
         </listitem>
      </itemizedlist>

      <itemizedlist>
         <title>From version 3.0.2 to 3.0.3-rc1</title>
         <listitem>
            <para>New configure scripts, with more standard default values for paths, etc. This aims at simplifying the packaging of fcron. Thanks go to Patrice Dumas for his patch!</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>New make targets: perms and strip. This aims at simplifying the packaging of fcron. Thanks go to Patrice Dumas for his patch!</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>Set environment variable LOGNAME when running a job (as Vixie Cron does: thanks Martin McGreal for pointing that out).</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>Portability work for AIX 5.2 and Solaris 8 and 10 (thanks Martin McGreal).</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>Chmod()ed fcron's fifo file to 777. It was 666 previously, but the exec bit is needed for AIX and apparently ignored on other platforms, so we now set it to.</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>Set TZ environment variable for lines which uses fcron option timezone.</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>A file was closed twice by fcrontab: removed the duplicate close().</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>Replaced include sys/termios.h by termios.h.</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>Fixed a fcrontab bug cause by an return value not handled and resulting in many useless (but pretty much harmless) iteration in a loop.</para>
         </listitem>
      </itemizedlist>

      <itemizedlist>
         <title>From version 3.0.1 to 3.0.2</title>
         <listitem>
            <para>Use sockaddr's field sa_len/sun_len on system defining it (BSD, ...). It should allow fcrondyn to connect to fcron on these systems.</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>Non-SELinux systems: run each job in a different session by calling setuid() for each one of them. This is to improve compatibility with Vixie cron.</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>Don't use the shell defined in /etc/passwd by default, but use the default value from fcron.conf instead. This is for compatibility with Vixie cron.</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>Use root name and group instead of root uid and gid. This seems more logical since the configure scripts asks for the name and group and not the uid and gid.</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>Added an init file for Suse in script/ (contribution from Alex: thanks!).</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>Minor spelling fixes in the French documentation.</para>
         </listitem>     
      </itemizedlist>

      <itemizedlist>
         <title>From version 3.0.0 to 3.0.1</title>
         <listitem>
            <para>fcrontab: access user's directory with user's rights (necessary if user/group fcron has not the right to read the directory).</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>improvement in check_system_crontabs: more comments, added some help messages, added command line options, cleaner, safer code.</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>Improved English documentation: clarified some previously-unclear points.</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>Added French translation of the manual pages (thanks go to Alain Portal)</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>Removed old documentation from the package.</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>Better handling of the pipes in job.c: this should remove some problems encountered on BSD systems.</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>bug fix: do not use a tv_usec > 999999: should fix the problem encountered on BSD systems with select().</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>bug fix: fixed a bug in make_msg(): the size of a string written to a buffer was not controlled correctly in some cases. This could result in buffer overflow and thus this was security problem. However the bug seems not exploitable as the part of the string which could overflow the buffer could not be freely defined by an attacker (it was either ": " or one of the strings returned by strerror()).</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>Bug fix: set the FDs correctly for select().</para>
         </listitem>
      </itemizedlist>

      <itemizedlist>
         <title>From version 2.9.7 to 3.0.0</title>
         <listitem>
            <para>Added a missing entry in changelog (changes from 2.9.6 to 2.9.7, bug fix for NetBSD).</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>Merged a patch for the check_system_crontabs script (Security enhancements and cleanups).</para>
         </listitem>
      </itemizedlist>

      <itemizedlist>
         <title>From version 2.9.6 to 2.9.7</title>
         <listitem>
            <para>Added time zone support (option timezone).</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>Better support FreeBSD's users and groups modifications in
               fcron's install scripts.</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>Fixed a bug which used to make fcron send empty mails on very
               recent systems.</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>Fixed a bug which prevented fcrondyn to being used on NetBSD (thanks go to Gabor Z. Papp).</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>Added some casts in fileconf.c and save.c (to avoid some
               warnings when compiling on HP-UX).</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>Added a FAQ entry on how to emulate an anacron entry.</para>
         </listitem>
      </itemizedlist>

      <itemizedlist>
         <title>From version 2.9.5.1 to 2.9.6</title>
         <listitem>
            <para>fixed the bug which made jobs run an hour too early after a
               daylight saving time change.</para>
            <para>Added detailed explanations about when a job will run when
               there is a DST change in the FAQ.</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>fixed fcrondyn's "Unknown command" bug on x86_64 (thanks go to
               Georgi Georgiev).</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>made fcrontab behave better when there is no space left in the
               spool directory (used to truncate the fcrontab source file).
            </para>
         <listitem>
            <para>Added a script, check_system_crontabs, to emulate Vixie cron's
               behavior about /etc/crontab and /etc/cron.d. Please have a look
               at the top of script/check_system_crontabs for more information.
            </para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>HP-UX support (needs more tests).</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>bug fix: restore umask even if fcron runs
               unprivileged.</para>
         </listitem>
      </itemizedlist>

      <itemizedlist>
         <title>From version 2.9.5 to 2.9.5.1</title>
         <listitem>
            <para>Fixed serious security vulnerabilities in fcronsighup, and
               improved fcronsighup's overall security (drop privileges, better
               check user inputs, etc).</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>Fixed several typos in the doc.</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>Updated debian package scripts (patch from debian
               maintainer).</para>
         </listitem>
      </itemizedlist>

      <itemizedlist>
         <title>From version 2.9.4 to 2.9.5</title>
         <listitem>
            <para>Ported to HP-UX (thanks go to Scott Tinsley)</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>Implemented fcrondyn commands run and runnow.</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>Merged patch from Russell Coker for new SE Linux.</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>Merged debian/ dir for debian package.</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>Mail reports: put the same username in the To: field than the
               one we give as recipient to the MTA. mailto can now also be a
               fully qualified email address.</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>changed a log message: a job which has ended without error is
               reported has "completed" (which is more appropriated than
               "terminated").
            </para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>Internal changes in log.c: code is more segmented, and code
               has been added to be able to send log message to fcrondyn. Syslog
               messages are now never longer than MAX_MSG (even with string from
               strerror()).</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>Fixed a bug which happened on Daylight Saving Time change on
               some systems. It would make fcron run into a nasty infinite loop.
               Added a sanity check in set_nextexe() to avoid such
               things.</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>Fixed a crash bug: in 2.9.4, if a user run ls_exeq when a job
               is running and has been removed from its fcrontab, it makes fcron
               crash.</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>Fixed a small bug: scripts were supposing perl was in
               /usr/bin.</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>Fixed a bug which caused the pid of a child process to be
               incorrectly read</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>fixed memory leak: some strings returned by log.c:make_msg()
               weren't always free()d.</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>bug fix: fcrondyn commands renice and kill used not to handle
               correctly the case where a job has several entries in exeq
               (exesev jobs).</para>
         </listitem>
      </itemizedlist>

      <itemizedlist>
         <title>From version 2.9.3 to 2.9.4</title>
         <listitem>
            <para>Merged support for SE Linux (patch from Russell Coker: thanks!)
            </para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>Work on the documentation (fixed spelling mistakes, tried to
               make things clearer in fcrontab.5) (thanks Bill Wohler for your
               help!)</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>Changed the subject line of mail reports: it now contains the
               subject line, and is very similar to vixie cron's one.</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>Added a sum-up at the end of ./configure.</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>bug fix: "makewhatis" bug is fixed -- at last!</para>
            <para>In fact, the problems encountered were due to an abusively
               ignored signal SIGPIPE.</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>bug fix: possible crash of fcron when trying to save a file
               if there was no space left on device.</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>bug fix: we don't consider '-' and '_' as word delimiters for
               a username before the command anymore, since many programs have
               one of these characters in their name.</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>bug fix: option first was broken in fcron 2.9.3.</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>fixed a little typo in an error message
               (could->couldn't)</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>bug fix: do not ignore the last line of a fcrontab if there
               is no \n before the end of file.</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>fixed compile on SunOS 5.9 .</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>Fcron now compiles on MacOS X.</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>added some $srcdir to be able (again ;) ) to run configure
               from another directory.</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>Perf improvement: use buffer for i/o in run_job().</para>
         </listitem>
      </itemizedlist>

      <itemizedlist>
         <title>From version 2.9.2 to 2.9.3</title>
         <listitem>
            <para>security issue: fcron used not to check the fcrontabs
               installed by root for a standard user. This could make an
               inattentive superuser install a user job runas(root)
               involontary.</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>Perf improvement: we now use buffers to write something to
               disk (became necessary due to the use of O_SYNC).</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>To avoid loss of data in case of an hardware failure or a
               system crash, fcron now saves files to a temporary name, and then
               renames them to their definitive filename if everything's
               ok.</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>The PID indicated by fcrondyn is now the pid of the job itself
               (up to now, it was the one of the fcron process controlling the
               job).</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>Implemented functions kill (send a signal to a running job)
               and renice (change the priority of a running job) in
               fcrondyn.</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>Added fcron's option -q to control the lavg and serial queue
               sizes.
            </para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>Added some timeouts in fcron for fcrondyn clients.</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>Fcron is less restrictive concerning mailto addresses. In
               particular, you can now use address like user@host.</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>bug fix: in 2.9.2, fcrontab and fcron did not set correctly
               some file modes.</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>bug (introduced in 2.9.1): when a job stops with an non-zero
               exit status or because it has been signaled, send a mail to its
               owner to inform him (in 2.9.1 and 2.9.2, the mail was sent, but
               contained nothing).</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>code clean: use the same scheme for all struct types, removed
               some code redundancy (save to disk management).</para>
         </listitem>
      </itemizedlist>

      <itemizedlist>
         <title>From version 2.9.1 to 2.9.2</title>
         <listitem>
            <para>Added a system fcrontab. Root can access it with fcrontab by
               using "-u systab".</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>fcrondyn's ls_lavgq, ls_serialq and ls_exeq are now
               functional.</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>mailto can now be set to a non-real user (for ex., an
               alias).</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>fcron now calls shutdown() when a connection from fcrondyn is
               closed.  Another change in the code should prevent fcrondyn from
               not returning to the prompt after a command has been run.</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>use open() instead of fopen() to write files, for more
               security.</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>fcrontab sets euid=uid before running the editor. This is
               required by some programs (for instance, perl).</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>bug fix: using DESTDIR with make did not work with the
               doc.</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>Code clean: changed macros to make parameters clearly
               different from vars.</para>
         </listitem>
      </itemizedlist>

      <itemizedlist>
         <title>From version 2.9.0 to 2.9.1</title>
         <listitem>
            <para>fcron can now be run without root's privileges (<link
                  linkend="faq">see FAQ</link>)</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>added configure's option --with-boot-install .</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>Minor change in the PAM code of fcron: may work better on
               some systems.</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>configure script now uses getpwnam() and getgrnam() instead of
               reading directly /etc/passwd and /etc/group: this makes easier
               the use of NIS, LDAP, etc.</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>Bug fix: using some "cmd > /dev/stderr" (or stdout) in a
               script used to make fcron send a bogus output mail. (rewrite of
               the code managing the output of jobs)</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>Bug fix: typo error prevented fcrontab to be compiled on some
               systems.</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>Minor bug fix about stdout option.</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>Minor bug fix: giving fcrontab's option -c a relative path
               now works correctly.</para>
         </listitem>
      </itemizedlist>

      <itemizedlist>
         <title>From version 2.1.0 to 2.9.0</title>
         <listitem>
            <para>Added some new options to fcron: -y, -o, -l; and some
               fcrontab options: stdout and volatile. All these permit to make
               fcron run in foreground, execute all the pending jobs (mainly
               %-jobs), and return. May be used, for instance, in a ppp-up
               script with a dialup connection to update a software
               regularly.</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>Added fcrondyn: this software allows users to dialog
               dyn-amically with a running fcron daemon. Currently, it can list
               jobs of the user running it (or all jobs for root). In the near
               future, it should be able to run a job, change its next time and
               date of execution, renice a running job, send a signal to a
               running job, etc.</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>All the documentation has been ported to SGML DocBook.</para>
            <para>It results on a much better HTML version, which I recommand
               you use. It is installed by default in fcron documentation
               directory (for instance, on my system:
               <filename>/usr/share/doc/fcron-X.X.X/</filename>).</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>Fcrontab.5 has been updated and improved. Some examples have
               been added and some possible use of the different lines and
               options are mentioned.</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>Added option random, which allows an entry run periodically to
               be run at a random time in its intervals of execution, instead of
               being run as soon as possible.</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>added some more checks in fileconf.c: allow user to use
               hours, days, hourly, daily, etc options only with %-lines: it is
               ignored if set for a &-line, which is quite confusing for users
               who may type, for instance "&amp;hourly" instead of
               "%hourly".</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>bug fixed: you can now use arguments in the var EDITOR and
               VISUAL.</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>bug fixed: fcron used to call sometimes a sleep(-1), which
               causes a freeze (no crash, but a very very long sleep :) ) under
               system using LIBC5, and maybe on some non-linux systems. It was
               not causing any problem under GLIBC2. Thanks go to Nick
               Pasich.</para>
         </listitem>
      </itemizedlist>
      
      <itemizedlist>
         <title>From version 2.0.0 to 2.1.0</title>
         <listitem>
            <para>PAM support for fcron and fcrontab (need testing! - help
               would be appreciated).</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>Fcron now send a mail if a job has noticenotrun set and could
               not be run because of a queue full.</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>Fcron now compiles on AIX (thank you, John A. Parker!), and a
               few AIX-only bugs have been fixed, but it may remain some
               problems to correct.  Please try, and tell me!</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>We now use constants ROOTUID and ROOTGID instead of some
               hard-coded "0", and those constants are defined by the configure
               script (we use the uid/gid of the name given with the option
               "--with-root{name|group}"). It allows fcron to be run on system
               on which root is not uid/gid 0/0.</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>code cleaning.</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>bug fixed: setting lavg to (0,0,0) used to make the line be
               added in the lavg queue instead of the serial queue (but the
               lavgs were ignored anyway).</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>bug fixed: fcrontab's "-z" option was not ignoring previous
               user's fcrontab version.</para> </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>bug fixed: on systems using putenv(), the var HOME, USER and
               SHELL wasn't correctly assigned. On system supporting setenv()
               (which is the default), the problem did not occur. (thanks go to
               Evan A. Zacks).</para>
         </listitem>
      </itemizedlist>


      <itemizedlist>
         <title>From version 1.1.1 to 2.0.0</title>
         <listitem>
            <para>using SIGUSR2 on fcron makes it print its current schedule on
               syslog and toggles on/off the printing of debug info on
               syslog.</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>fcron behavior on serial and lavg queues overflow has changed: 
               in previous versions, it used to run a job to make room to put
               a new one. As it may conduct to a overwhelming of system
               resources, the new job is now refused (and not run). An error
               message is also logged through syslog.</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>a mail is now sent if the job exited due to a signal, or if
               exit status is non-zero. Read FAQ if you experience problems
               about that.</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>added a FAQ.</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>bug fixed: a midmonthly job executed after the 15th of the
               month used to cause an endless loop. Thanks go to Guy Geens
               (thanks a lot!).</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>bug fixed: inserting a job in serial queue or running a job
               not finished at startup was broken, unless the job was
               strict(no).</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>bug fixed: some 1.1.1 changes used to make fcron impossible
               to compile without sendmail (./configure's option
               "--with-sendmail=no").</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>bug fixed in sysV boot script: we know specify explicitly the
               path to fcron.</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>bug fixed: unresolved error used to occur on some system not
               defining getopt_long().</para>
         </listitem>
      </itemizedlist>

      <itemizedlist>
         <title>From version 1.1.0 to 1.1.1</title>
         <listitem>
            <para>security fix: sym link attack against fcrontab. Any user
               allowed to use fcrontab used to be able to remove any fcrontab,
               and potentially to truncate any file to zero-length (under
               certain conditions, anyway).</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>fcron and fcrontab now have a configuration file: fcron.conf.
               It contains the default paths (spool dir, etc) and programs to
               use (editor, shell, etc). Thanks to that file, several fcron
               processes can run simultaneously if they have a different config
               (different spool dir and pid file).</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>added fcron's option "-m" to control the number of serial jobs
               which can be executed simultaneously.</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>added fcron's option "-n" to create a new spool dir.</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>command line syntax of fcrontab has changed: you can know use
               "user" (after the file name if any) instead of "-u user". It
               should make fcrontab a little more intuitive.</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>It is now possible to put a user name between the time/date
               fields and the shell command of a fcrontab line (for Vixie cron
               format compatibility): it is equivalent to runas(user).</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>support of Solaris (and SysV).</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>early support of OpenBSD.</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>the installation scripts now use nsswitch.conf to detect if a
               user or a group exists on the system. That way, naming services
               (NYS, ldap, etc) are supported.</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>the man page and doc is now installed by default in
               $prefix/share/{man|doc} (instead of the previous
               $prefix/{man|doc}) ($prefix is generally "/usr").</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>bug corrected: fcron used not to add a serial_sev line to
               serial/lavg queue if this line was running, saying "already in
               serial queue".</para>
         </listitem>

         <listitem>
            <para>bug corrected: a "all" in fcron.allow with no fcron.deny file
               was not considered as an allow rule.</para>
         </listitem>
      </itemizedlist>

      <itemizedlist>
         <title>From version 1.0.3 to 1.1.0</title>
         <listitem>
            <para>The binary format of the binary fcrontabs has changed: there
               is now no more need to reinstall the fcrontabs when upgrading
               fcron (but you need to convert your fcrontabs to the new format
               once), and this format should allow extensions without losing any
               information.</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>better management of the errors in load/save fcrontabs
               functions.</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>the doc is a clearer about @-lines.</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>more security tests by fcrontab in the case it is suid root
               (but, if possible, it should be suid fcron as it is far more
               secure).</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>we now remove unwanted fcrontabs before loading them in memory: 
               well, it seems to be more logical like that :)) .</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>bug fix: using options first with a &-line may have led to
               some problems during the first read by fcron (mail send
               erroneously if noticenotrun was used, bad set of the first
               execution's time and date or immediate execution if bootrun was
               set: in fact, the line was not recognized as a new line).</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>bug fix: fcron used not to be able to be compiled from any
               directory because of an absent -I. line option for the compiler
               (the config.h file was not found).</para>
         </listitem>
      </itemizedlist>

      <itemizedlist>
         <title>From version 1.0.2 to 1.0.3</title>
         <listitem>
            <para>fcron can now be configured and compiled from any directory
               (not only from the source dir).</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>bug fix: fcron now sets umask to the value it got at start
               before running a job.</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>bug corrected: a bug used to make the "truncated" system not
               to work correctly, so a too long log message used to make fcron
               crash.</para>
         </listitem>
      </itemizedlist>

      <itemizedlist>
         <title>From version 1.0.1 to 1.0.2</title>
         <listitem>
            <para>the user for whom a job is run is now logged.</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>installation script is now more explicit about what it is
               going to do.</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>a boolean value can now also be set by "yes" and "no".</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>bug corrected: bootrun option works again.</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>bug corrected: shell variable containing underscore (_) used
               to be rejected.</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>bug corrected: installation script used not to check if user
               fcron was in group fcron, in which case fcrontab doesn't work
               correctly (it cannot, in that case, read the fcrontabs for
               non-privileged users).</para>
         </listitem>
      </itemizedlist>

      <itemizedlist>
         <title>From version 1.0.0 to 1.0.1</title>
         <listitem>
            <para>security fix: a user used to be able to read a file owned by
               root if root runs a "fcrontab -u user -e".</para>
         </listitem>
      </itemizedlist>

      <itemizedlist>
         <title>From version 0.9.5 to 1.0.0</title>
         <listitem>
            <para>added fcron's option "-s" to control the time between two
               saves of the fcrontabs on disk.</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>installation scripts now support better FreeBSD and sh.</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>bug corrected: configure's options prefix and
               without-sendmail used not to work.</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>bug corrected: installing an fcrontab by "fcrontab file"
               wasn't working correctly with a relative path (a path not
               beginning by a "/").</para>
         </listitem>
      </itemizedlist>

      <itemizedlist>
         <title>From version 0.9.4 to 0.9.5</title>
         <listitem>
            <para>security fix: the jobs of a fcrontab reinstalled by root used
               to be run as root (until the next action of the owner on the
               fcrontab).</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>added options strict and noticenotrun to tell fcron
               respectively if a job should be removed from lavg queue if its
               execution interval is exceeded, and if fcron should mail user to
               report the non-execution of a job.</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>added option nolog in order to log only errors (i.e. no
               message like "job x started"). This can help to reduce the disk
               access and save energy on a laptop, and make the log more
               readable if some jobs are run very often.</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>better handle of changes of the uids of users in /etc/passwd
               (no more need to reinstall the fcrontabs).</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>fcron.deny and fcron.allow files are now owned by root (they
               used to be owned by user fcron).</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>added ./configure's option --with-answer-all to be able to use
               "make install" in a non-interactive way (can be useful for
               automatic installers).</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>added option --with-rootname and --with-rootgroup to
               ./configure script for a better support of exotic systems.</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>bug corrected in make install (script user-group): the script
               used not to handle correctly the absence of both useradd and
               adduser commands.  This script now checks and tries to add a
               group fcron if necessary.</para>
         </listitem>
      </itemizedlist>

      <itemizedlist>
         <title>From version 0.9.3 to 0.9.4</title>
         <listitem>
            <para>security improvement: after the (horrible) root exploit found
               in version 0.9.3, I decided to improve fcron/fcrontab's security.
               I've included some strong (I hope :)) ) tests in fcron to ensure
               that only root can run commands as superuser and use option
               runas. Even an corrupted fcrontab should not be able to get
               root's privileges. Pretty reassuring, isn't it?</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>runfreq(1) lines have been replaced and extended by a new kind
               of line: the lines beginning by a "%". It's now possible to tell
               fcron to run a command once an hour, a week, etc, but only at
               some specified moments. For instance: '%weekly * 4-7 echo "foo"'
               will run the command 'echo "foo"' once a week between 4 and 7 in
               the morning. (see "man 5 fcrontab" for more details).</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>installation process improved: user is now consulted before
               anything is done about installation in boot scripts, etc. The
               default username of fcron is now ... fcron! (this is more secure
               than daemon, which can be used by other programs). </para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>fcron now adds the host name to the addresses of the mails it
               sends.</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>fcrontab determines the identity of the running user by his
               uid (it used to use the var USER). That way, fcrontab should act
               as crontab under a "su".</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>bug fixed: a tmp file was not removed after a "fcron
               -z"</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>bug fixed in fcrontab: an expression of the form "start-stop"
               with start > stop used to be incorrectly managed by fcron.</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>bug fixed: when fcron and fcrontab were installed under a
               non-privileged user rights, a normal user used to be not able to
               use fcrontab.</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>bug fixed: while fcrontab was asking user if he would like to
               correct an erroneous line, the answer was not correctly
               handled.</para>
         </listitem>
      </itemizedlist>

      <itemizedlist>
         <title>From version 0.9.2.1 to 0.9.3</title>
         <listitem>
            <para>installation scripts improved.</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>added code to avoid infinite loops.</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>bugs corrected in the functions to set the time and date of
               next execution.</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>bug corrected in the check for invalid lines.</para>
         </listitem>
      </itemizedlist>

      <itemizedlist>
         <title>From version 0.9.2 to 0.9.2.1</title>
         <listitem>
            <para>minor bug corrected in Makefile</para>
         </listitem>
      </itemizedlist>

      <itemizedlist>
         <title>From version 0.9.1 to 0.9.2</title>
         <listitem>
            <para>fcron now uses autoconf (the configure script), so it should
               be easier to compile and install it and various systems.</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>support of lavg options for all systems where getloadavg() is
               defined (BSD unix, etc) and on Linux systems with a proc
               filesystem (fcron can use /proc/loadavg).</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>a job can now be executed several times simultaneously if
               option exesev is set to 1.</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>user can determine if a job can be put several times in the
               serial queue simultaneously thanks to option serialonce.</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>fcron does not wait anymore for the completion of all jobs of
               a file before deleting it from memory.</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>fcron handles correctly the jobs which are both serial and
               lavg.</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>fcron now runs under a specific user and group (other than
               root) for basic security reasons.</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>bug corrected: fcron used to crash after a file was deleted
               from memory in some conditions.</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>corrected the bug which used to appear when a line was put
               several times in the serial queue: in this case, fcron used not
               to count correctly the number of running serial jobs.</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>bug corrected: fcrontab used not to remove the temporary file
               it creates if no modification where done to a file after an
               edition using the -e option and on errors.</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>bug corrected: fcrontab now defines correctly the remain
               value of a line based on time and date beginning with a "&" but
               without runfreq definition.</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>bug corrected: fcron used to not install correctly a file
               edited if a correction was made.</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>bug corrected: reset option was not working correctly when
               set to a single line.</para>
         </listitem>
      </itemizedlist>

      <itemizedlist>
         <title>From version 0.9.0 to 0.9.1</title>
         <listitem>
            <para>support of the option mailto for each line (it used to be set
               for the whole file).</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>the value of the runas and mailto options are now stored
               internally as a uid number: you must reinstall all the system's
               fcrontabs if you change the uid of a user.</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>Support of options "lavg*", in order to run a job under a
               specific 1, 5 and/or 15 minutes system load average value(s).
               When the job should be run, it is placed in a specific queue and
               the load average is checked regularly until the right value(s)
               is/are got. The options "lavgor" and "lavgand" permits users to
               tell fcron if they prefer to perform a logic OR or AND between
               the 1, 5 and 15 load average values. The option "until" can be
               use to force the execution of a job after a determined timeout if
               the right conditions to run the job are not filled.</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>fcron now uses putenv() in place of setenv() (setenv() is not
               POSIX compliant).</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>a mailto option set to "" is now equivalent to
               "mail(false)".</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>corrected the bug which used to make a bootrun and runfreq(1)
               job executed twice when fcron's start occurs in an interval of
               execution of the job.</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>corrected the bug which used to make fcron crash after
               serial_array is resized.</para>
         </listitem>
      </itemizedlist>

      <itemizedlist>
         <title>From version 0.8.3 to 0.9.0</title>
         <listitem>
            <para>support of options in fcrontabs. Options can be specific to a
               line or defined once for every line located after their
               definition (a special option "reset" set all options to their
               default). Some options also have too names: a long name and an
               abbreviation.</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>jobs can now be run be run one after the other (option
               "serial"): when the job should normally be run, it is added to a
               queue, which entries are executed one by one. It permits to avoid
               the use of a lot of system resources for a brief moment by the
               simultaneous execution of several tasks.</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>jobs can be run at system start up if they should have been
               run during system down time (option "bootrun").</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>root can run jobs as an another user (option "runas")</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>user can set a nice value to a job, but only root can use a
               negative value (a negative value will increase priority)</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>user can choose to perform a logic AND or a logic OR between
               day of month and day of week (option "dayor" and "dayand")</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>user can choose to mail the output of jobs (option "mail") if
               any, and can force fcron to send a mail even if output is
               zero-length (option "forcemail").</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>fixed the bug which used to make fcron run a job with a
               runfreq set to 1 at a wrong time.</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>fixed a bug which used to make fcrontab crash after several
               corrections in edit mode.</para>
         </listitem>
      </itemizedlist>

      <itemizedlist>
         <title>From version 0.8.2 to 0.8.3</title>
         <listitem>
            <para>(all this bugs appeared in version 0.8.2 :)</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>fixed the bug which used to make fcron crash after a
               SIGHUP</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>fixed the bug which used to prevent fcron from running some
               job based on time and date</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>fixed the bug which used to makes fcron run the jobs one
               second too late</para>
         </listitem>
      </itemizedlist>

      <itemizedlist>
         <title>From version 0.8.1 to 0.8.2</title>
         <listitem>
            <para>code has been optimized: The jobs are now queued in order of
               execution. It permits avoid useless tests of all jobs every time
               fcron wakes up, speeds up the determination of the time fcron
               should sleep, speeds up the processing after the end of a job,
               etc. I don't know why I haven't made it before :-) ...</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>fcrontab has been improved: it is now more stable (many bugs
               which used to make fcrontab crash in case of errors in the
               fcrontab has been fixed). Plus, it now asks if you want to make
               corrections if needed when editing.</para>
         </listitem>
      </itemizedlist>

      <itemizedlist>
         <title>From version 0.8.0 to 0.8.1</title>
         <listitem>
            <para>ported to FreeBSD 4.0</para>
         </listitem>
      </itemizedlist>

      <itemizedlist>
         <title>From version 0.7.0 to 0.8.0</title>
         <listitem>
            <para>corrected the bug which keep normal users from listing and
               editing their current configuration file with fcrontab -l or
               -e.</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>corrected the bugs which used to block fcron when a task was
               marked for execution but fcron stopped before it has been
               launched, and when fcron stopped after the end of a job but
               before the output has been mailed.</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>day of week 0 and 7 now both mean Sunday.</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>the abbreviations of months and day of week are not any more
               case dependent.</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>months are now defined from 1 to 12 (and not from 0 to 11) (it
               was a little bit illogical :-).</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>you can now force spaces in strings if you place them in
               quotes.</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>I discovered ispell :-) ...</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>I've added a kind of signature in the formated configuration
               files in order to keep the daemon from attempting to read an old
               configuration file which doesn't use the same syntax.</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>You can now install a file with fcrontab from standard
               input.</para>
         </listitem>
         <listitem>
            <para>others minor adds and bug corrections.</para>
         </listitem>
      </itemizedlist>
   </sect1>

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