Bogofilter-0.94.12 - New Stable Release

[David Relson]

It has been a long time since bogofilter's last stable release
(version 0.92.8, Oct 19 2004), but the time has come to promote the
current version (0.94.11) from "current" to "stable".  Since the
RELEASE.NOTES have a new "summary of changes" since the recent
"current" release and there have been a number of documentation
updates, the version number has been bumped up to 0.94.12.

The biggest change in bogofilter is support for Berkeley DB's
transaction capability.

Lesser changes include a change in classification defaults (from
bi-state to tri-state classification), documentation updates (esp man
page and FAQ), internal code cleanups (including how long options are
processed).

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Files are available at http://sourceforge.net/projects/bogofilter for
download.

Here are the md5sums for the release:

1a2825782885f606c9779f2569ca0ac7  bogofilter-0.94.12-1.i586.rpm
3c9d9eb40bb833e9ea0aaedc8936cde0  bogofilter-0.94.12-1.src.rpm
489337defebff75d8e2b46350e946752  bogofilter-0.94.12.tar.bz2
1c578a27fe6e51ad0fd63374cf241335  bogofilter-0.94.12.tar.gz
fed29b28e2d0e16ff5407e9e3ae2f42e  bogofilter-static-0.94.12-1.i586.rpm

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---- Classification Change ----

Bogofilter's classification default has changed from two-state (Yes/No)
to tri-state (Spam/Ham/Unsure).  This shows up as a change to the
X-Bogosity line.  Spam and ham now appear as:

    X-Bogosity: Ham, tests=bogofilter, spamicity=0.011004, ...
    X-Bogosity: Spam, tests=bogofilter, spamicity=0.922911, ...

Previously the words "Yes" and "No" were used to identify ham and
spam.  Classification "Unsure" is used for messages scoring between
0.45 and 0.99).

---- Changed Options ----

Some options have been added or modified.  If you use any of the
changed options, you will probably need to modify your scripts,
procmail recipes, etc.  As an example, some bogoutil options which
used to allow either filenames or directory names are now restricted
to filenames.  See the man pages and help messages if you have
concerns.

---- Transaction Information ----

Prior to version 0.93.0, bogofilter used Berkeley DB only in its
non-transactional mode.  With 0.93.0, the use of Berkeley DB's
transactional mode was added.  Why transactions?  Because transactions
offer ACID, which stands for Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, and
Durability, which are key to transaction processing in databases and
ensuring the integrity of a database.  For more on the subject, see
Wikipedia, i.e.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACID.  

What transactions offer is additional protection against database
corruption.  They also include record level locking which makes it
possible for multiples copies of bogofilter (and bogoutil) to be 
reading and writing the wordlist at the same time.  To make this
happen, Berkeley DB uses additional files, specifically lockfiles and
log files.  The presence of these files means that copying a wordlist
can no longer be done using the "cp" command.  Bogofilter now includes
utility scripts bf_compact, bf_copy, bf_resize, and bf_tar for
handling 4 common chores relating to databases.

Bogofilter's default build makes use of transactions optional.  If
you've never used transactions and haven't told bogofilter to use
them, it won't use them.  This simplifies administering bogofilter,
though the risk of a corrupted database is higher.  See file
doc/README.db for more detailed technical information on bogofilter's
handling of transactions and how to set up your machine to best support
transactions.

When bogofilter starts, it'll check the bogofilter directory (which
contains the wordlist file) to see if transactions have been used.  If
so, it will use transactions; if not, it won't use them.

This auto-probing can be overridden when running bogofilter and
bogoutil.  All that is needed is the proper a command line option (
"--db-transaction=yes" or "-db--transaction=no" ) or the proper config
file option ("db_transaction=yes" or "db_transaction=no").

Alternatively, when building from source, ./configure can be given
option "--enable-transactions" or "--disable-transactions" to build
executables that will only operate in one mode (and that are a slight
bit smaller).

---- SQLite3 Backend ----

SQLite3 is also supported. It is an alternative, easy-to-handle
datastore that also exhibits ACID properties.  It has the same
guarantees as Berkeley DB Transactional Data Store, without the
headaches of lock files and log files.  Version 3.2.0 is required.

---- Other Changes ----

For information on other changes, see the Change Log in the NEWS file.