Errata

The libESMTP git repository has been rebuilt by hand from the collection of released tarballs. A few errors or inconsistencies occurred during this process meaning that a tarball built from the repository will differ from the original.

The intention was not to provide byte-identical record of released tarballs, rather, it was to be able to review how source code changed should the need arise. For example, there was a regression in X.509 certificate validation at one point. Consequently only the last widely distributed release, v1.0.6, was properly validated as buildable.

The majority of differences are minor, most are due to the decision to exclude generated files from the repository (autotools pollutes the source with a large number of files).

Minor Differences

Files generated by GNU autotools and associated tools such as libtoolize were removed, with the following caveats:

  • acinclude.m4 should have been removed but was not.

  • stamp-h.in should have been removed but was not.

  • libesmtp.spec was removed but accidentally added back in v0.8.1. Removed again in v0.8.7.

  • acconfig.h is generated from v0.8.2 but was not removed from the repository.

v0.8.5 renamed rfc822date.[ch] to rfc2822date.[ch]. The latter were added as new files to the repository rather than using git mv. The old files were not removed until revision bdbc6c2c15e7.

The files COPYING and COPYING.GPL are incorrect wrt the tarballs from v1.0.4.

configure.in

A more serious error occurred when the v0.8.5 tarball reverted configure.ac to configure.in due to autoconf version problems (who knew?). Here is the comment from Changelog:

configure.in acinclude.m4 acconfig.h

Reverted to configure.in, reinstated acconfig.h and added some compatibility stuff to acinclude.m4. All this to try and be compatible with autoconf 2.5 and 2.13. I really hate autoconf.

This step was unfortunately missed when adding v0.8.5 to the repository. If you need to build previous releases for any reason this is a problem as the correct revision of configure.in is missing from the repository.

configure.ac was reinstated in v1.0.6. Unfortunately this was not noticed as only v1.0.6 was validated to build as noted above. My personal view is that if older versions of libESMTP must be built then it would be significantly easier to back-port the Meson build files.

Remedial Action

Since it is not recommended to use versions of libESMTP prior to 1.0.6 no action is taken to correct these. The notes above should be sufficient to correctly build earlier versions if absolutely required.

A branch for v1.0.6 is created and patched to ensure consistency with the widely distributed tarball, however README is updated to the current repository.

Since autotools is completely removed and libESMTP migrated to Meson at revision 5ea5d5ec7c7f no further action is taken.