Francis forwarded today Paul Vixie's announcement of the BETA1 version of BIND 4.9.3. Please note that BIND 4.9.3 is progressing at a quite fast - but always unpredictable - rate. So Paul already published and announced the BETA2 version yesterday (and the BETA1 version thus disappeared). Here are Paul's notes about changes:

Beta1->Beta2 changes are short but important. No diffs are available. You should grab the whole new tarball and make sure you like the way it works -- we're very close to a Final release on this version. The only outstanding bug is that ULTRIX/VAX machines have a "multiply defined" error in linking; given that it works fine on ULTRIX/RISC, OSF/1, BSD/386, and SunOS, I don't think there's much cause for alarm. The README file has been updated since Beta1, as well.

and the change log tells:

--- 4.9.3-beta2 released ---

120. I upgraded my "-me" macros so that the included doc/bog/file.psf is OK.

119. NXDOMAIN responses from the negative cache will now always be authoritative. this is the least of all evils, trust me.

118. strcasecmp() in compat/lib is now ANSI compliant.

117. PTR RR's are no longer subject to ROUND_ROBIN processing.

116. writev() emulation for SCO had a bug.

115. the resolver no longer calls sscanf() or qsort().

114. minor debugging nit cleaned up in res_querydomain().

113. IP options on incoming connections are now logged and ignored. This should probably be done for datagrams as well but not today.

112. tree.c made portable to non-POSIX/ANSI systems.

111. NSAP RR's are now supported. NSAP_PTR RR's are deprecated and so left out.

110. outbound zone transfers are now logged.

109. various lint cleaned up wrt 16-bit integer handling.

108. named-xfer was exiting bogusly on some systems due to flakey kernel interfaces. i've rewritten some of the code to avoid the problem, and fixed plenty of lint in the process.

--- 4.9.3-beta1 released ---

A few new errors (mainly portability related) in BETA2 have been reported already yesterday, so BETA2 is unlikely to become declared FINAL for 4.9.3. Paul posts the BIND announcements to the general BIND distribution list <bind@uunet.uu.net>; I'd expect everybody who is interested in installing very new BIND software (as opposed to "just run the currently established most recent good version") is a subscriber of bind@uunet.uu.net and will see the announcements that way; those interested in testing and pushing the very newest versions (eventually including experimental versions that really require some effort to watch what they are doing) anyway need to be on the BIND workers' list. Ruediger Ruediger Volk Universitaet Dortmund, Informatik IRB D-44221 Dortmund, Germany E-Mail: rv@Informatik.Uni-Dortmund.DE Phone: +49 231 755 4760 Fax: +49 231 755 2386