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Archive-name: usenet/software/part1
Original-from: spaf@cs.purdue.edu (Gene Spafford)
Comment: edited until 5/93 by spaf@cs.purdue.edu (Gene Spafford)
Last-change: 3 Dec 1996 by netannounce@deshaw.com (Mark Moraes)
Changes-posted-to: news.admin.misc,news.misc,news.software.readers,news.software.b,news.answers

• Usenet traces its birth back to 1979, there are various versions (A news, B news, C news) of news software discussed in Usenet Software before INN.
  
  INN Before the ISC
  
• INN was developed by Rich Salz, and released on August 20, 1992. It was introduced in
  "InterNetNews: Usenet Transport for Internet Sites" published in the June 1992 Usenix Technical Conference Proceedings. You can read it as part of the Usenet RKT.
  
  Rich's last official release was 1.4sec in Dec 1993.
  
  
• In June 1995, David Barr began a series of "unoffical" (but very well received) releases of INN based on 1.4sec. This work was needed to integrate various bug-fixes, enhancements and security patches.
  
  Dave Barr's last release was 1.4unoff4, at which point further enhancements were stopped as development was taken over by the Internet Software Consortium (ISC) See also INN FAQ What's the future of unoff releases? and the INN 1.5.1 README Some history
  
  INN at the ISC
  
• The ISC's first release was 1.5, quickly followed by INN 1.5.1 on December 17, 1996
  
  
• March/April 1997 A fix for a security defect in the parsecontrol shell script was released.
  
  
• July 1997, string buffer overrun defects were announced, and INN 1.6 beta was released. 1.6 beta had new features as well as some new serious defects. 1.6b2 and 1.6b3 followed quickly.
  Even at that time, 1.6b3 had a serious defect which requires a patch to be stable.
  
  
• July 1997, After many requests, the ISC released a 1.5.1 sec, a security fix" version.
  This version was flawed with new serious defects, and quickly followed by 1.5.1sec2 which also needed two patches to be stable. Even with the two patches, 1.5.1sec2 did not fix all the known serious defects which were corrected in 1.6.
  
  
• August 25, 1997: Mib Software reverse engineered the changes of 1.6b3 and made someadditional fixes to generate inn1.5.1corr. This fixed nearly all the known defects in 1.5.1, and provided no new features. For a time this was the only release I considered to be "production stable." until the ISC renamed it INN 1.7 Usenet RKT Subscribers were notified of any new developments, defects (and patches) as they were discovered.
  
  
• Late September 1997, Dave Barr announced 1.5.2pre1. This was an effort to match the defect fixes of inn1.5.1corr. Defects in nc.c (which implements the NNTP protocol.) which can cause connections to hang wer discussed on inn-workers. (See http://www.mibsoftware.com/userkt/inn/dev/inn-workers/vol9709/xfj.htm)
  
  No patch was made available for this defect, and there were some other defects not fixed. (See INN 1.5.2pre1 Software Action Items) Work on 1.5.2pre1 was dropped in favor of readying a new ISC release based on 1.5.1corr
  
  
• October 16, 1997: The ISC released INN 1.7, a version which is based on 1.5.1corr with a few differences. There are no new features. See the list of differences at http://www.mibsoftware.com/0022.htm
  
  
• December 9, 1997: The ISC released INN 1.7.2, which fixes some defects in INN 1.7.
  (INN 1.7.1 was a very short lived release.)
  
  The Future
  The development model for future versions of INN has changed to an "open model" with a team of volunteer programmers. A version building on INN 1.7, with additional features and configurability is in development. It is tentatively called INN 1.8. Expect a beta test in Spring 1998.