-
Moved to Pike version 7.8, which among many other things enables
full use of 64-bit hardware on most OS:es. Roxen 5.0 does not run on
any earlier Pike version.
COMPAT NOTE: There are a number of incompatibilities between Pike
7.4 and 7.8, but that is of no concern if you do not have your own
custom modules. Roxen module developers should take a look at the Pike release notes
for 7.6 and 7.8. Most incompatibilities are mitigated by running in
7.4 compatibility mode, which is enabled by simply putting
"#pike 7.4" at the top of each pike (and pmod)
file.
-
Moved to MySQL version 5.0. Roxen no longer works with an earlier
version. By default it does not accept 5.1 or any later version
either, since that combination is unsupported. That check can
however be disabled with a define
ALLOW_UNSUPPORTED_MYSQL.
COMPAT NOTE: There are many MySQL compatibility considerations,
but unless you have your own databases or tables in the Roxen MySQL
you need not bother very much with them. Otherwise, please consult
the upgrade
notes in the MySQL manual for further details, for instance to get
information on how to update your query syntax. Note that there
might be actions you need to do on your MySQL data before
upgrading.
On upgrade, Roxen automatically updates the privilege tables in
MySQL to cover all new privileges, similar to what the mysql_upgrade
script does. Read-only access in the DB interface now translates to
Select_priv and Execute_priv, and read/write access
gives Select_priv, Insert_priv, Update_priv,
Delete_priv, Create_priv, Drop_priv,
References_priv, Index_priv, Alter_priv,
Create_tmp_table_priv, Lock_tables_priv,
Create_view_priv, Show_view_priv,
Create_routine_priv, Alter_routine_priv, and
Execute_priv.
-
It is now easier to make Roxen use another MySQL installation,
either one separately installed or one that comes with the OS
distribution. Paths to the MySQL installation directory and the most
important executables are specified in the file
mysql-location.txt in the Roxen server directory.
-
Databases: Introduced charset support for database connections.
The server can now keep track of the charset a database uses for
queries and returned text, and automatically do conversions to the
Unicode representation used internally in RXML etc. This currently
works for MySQL and Postgres (using the new pgsql driver). (Later
4.5 releases also had this feature to a limited degree.)
-
Databases: Fixed security issues where arbitrary databases in the
Roxen server could be reached through the SQL tags. The SQL
tags module now has a setting Allowed databases that
specifies which databases may be accessed through the SQL tags. This
setting is also used by some other modules that access databases,
e.g. <emit source="timerange" query="...">.
COMPAT NOTE: Database access is disabled by default, meaning that
essentially all SQL tags that don't use the default database will
not work until the Allowed databases setting has been
configured to local needs. The module logs connection attempts to
blocked databases in the event log, so it is possible to see that
way which ones that need to be let through.
-
Added new start up script for Roxen CMS on OS X. Handles start,
stop and restart.
-
IPv6 support. Roxen can now bind IPv6 ports, initiate connections
to other IPv6 servers, etcetera. (4.5 also had this to a limited
degree, if run on Pike 7.6 instead of the included 7.4.)
-
SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) support. This allows
monitoring of the Roxen server through SNMP v1 or v2c (but not v3).
It is enabled simply by registrering another port with protocol
snmp for a site configuration. Each site has its own SNMP
prefix, so several sites can share the same SNMP port.
-
Removed the old argcache system so that the new one is used by
default (i.e. ENABLE_NEW_ARGCACHE is no longer necessary).
This primarily means that links to auto-generated images are handled
in a more robust way, especially in replicated setups.
COMPAT NOTE: There is no compatibility fallback to read argcache
entries from the old database. An upgrade instead depends on that
the image cache remains intact for long enough so that old images
can be served without requiring their argcache
entries.
COMPAT NOTE: The old arguments table in the local database
is not dropped automatically. Administrators are adviced to do that
to free up space.
-
The server now automatically runs a consistency check of the
MySQL tables at startup.
-
Experimental support for gzip compression of http responses.
Enabled by the define HTTP_COMPRESSION.
-
The protocol cache can now continue to deliver stale cache
entries while new results are generated in the background. This can
mitigate very long response times and server choking when a cache
further back is being invalidated (typically the persistent disk
cache in the CMS). (This was also available as an experimental
feature in 4.5rel4 when ENABLE_SPCI was defined.)
-
Handling of incoming and outgoing charsets has been improved and
primarily works better in UTF-8 mode. UTF-8 is also the default
charset for form and query variables, with fallback to ISO-8859-1 if
UTF-8 decode fails. That should lessen the need for
<roxen-automatic-charset-variable> in forms (although
it still is useful to make forms work better for users with really
old browsers).
-
The size calculations for entries in the various RAM caches (seen
under Tasks/Status/Cache status in the Administration
Interface) are now much more accurate.
-
Added support for software packages. This is a system to be able
to install complex module distributions without putting everything
in the Roxen module path.
-
COMPAT NOTE: Roxen is no longer distributed with its own copies
of fonts that may override bitmap versions shipped to customers,
since the FreeType renderings are different enough to affect spacing
etc.
-
COMPAT NOTE: If a port is opened for more than one server
configuration, the fallback in case there is no site with the
"Default site" flag set in the server has changed slightly: Now the
configuration with the least specific port URL is used, while in
earlier versions the most specific port URL was chosen. This is a
fringe case that should only affect badly configured
servers.
-
The RXML type system has been extended with array and mapping
types, and it is now fully deployed in various RXML tags through
type attributes and type context sensitivity. See the new
RXML Type System chapter in the Web Developer manual
for all the details.
-
Cleaned up handling of the RXML nil value
(RXML.nil):
- Do not allow an RXML variable to be set to RXML.nil.
That deletes the variable instead.
- <emit source="sql" ...> maps SQL NULL
to a null value instead of RXML.nil.
- <if variable="var.foo"> is false both for
undefined variables (i.e. RXML.nil) and the SQL null
values.
- A new test <if variable-exists="var.foo"> is
added to test whether a variable is defined or not, i.e. it is
true for null values but not for undefined variables.
- <if sizeof=...> evaluates to zero both for
undefined and null variables, for compatibility.
- <copy-scope> no longer copies undefined
variables.
- <emit source="values"> and
<insert> sources variables and
scopes no longer list undefined variables.
COMPAT NOTE: Items 2, 6 and 7 are only activated if the compat
level is 5.0 or higher (items 3 and 5 don't affect compatibility
since null values didn't exist earlier).
-
Added an <emit> attribute filter-exclude
which does the opposite of filter.
-
Added encodings utf16, utf16be,
utf16le and hex which can be used in the encoding
spec for variable entities, e.g. &var.x:hex;.
-
Accessing the cookie scope no longer implicitly disables the
protocol cache. The protocol cache instead starts to vary on the
cookie value.
COMPAT NOTE: The old behavior meant that any RXML accessing
cookies implicitly disabled the protocol cache. That means the new
behavior can introduce overcaching side-effects in old code, even if
the protocol cache entries are cookie specific. Therefore the
cache-disabling behavior is kept if the compat level is 4.5 or
earlier.
-
The truth value (page.last-true) is now always set to
false when an RXML error is caught.
COMPAT NOTE: This is a change that might have compat
implications. It's only enabled on compat level
5.0.
-
The formatting of the online tag documentation has been improved
and shows the structure more clearly.
-
Added a <value> tag to do type casting and to
build compound values like arrays and mappings.
-
Added a <substring> tag that can pick out parts of
strings in a number of ways.
-
Added a <range> tag which is similar to
<substring> but operates on arrays instead.
-
<insert source="variables"> is made context
sensitive so that it returns the scope mapping as-is in an array or
mapping context.
-
The type handling in the <set> and
<append> tags has been cleaned up.
COMPAT NOTE: These changes have compatibility effects in some
cases. Their old behavior is retained on the 4.5 compat
level.
In particular, the <append> tag behaves
differently with arrays now. If you get errors in code that appends
string elements to arrays, then you probably want to add
type="text/*" to the <append> tag.
-
Extended the <set expr=...> expressions to allow
various set operations on arrays and mappings. The docs for it is
also adequate now.
-
SQL tags: The charset handling has been changed to fit the design
principle that strings are always unencoded Unicode internally in
RXML. It therefore not only controls the connection charset, but
perhaps more importantly it also encodes queries and decodes results
with that charset. That makes it useful also with databases without
charset support in the client library.
COMPAT NOTE: This change of the charset handling is incompatible.
The old behavior is retained on the 4.5 compat
level.
-
Additional RXML tags: Added two tags <dirname> and
<basename> to pick out the respective parts of a
path.
-
Additional RXML tags: Added an <xml-rpc-call> tag
to make simple synchronous xml-rpc calls. It is enabled by the same
option that enables synchronous <insert href>.
-
Additional RXML tags: Made it possible to pass data content in
<insert href> POST requests.
-
Image converter and GXML modules: A filename attribute
has been added to the <cimg> and GXML tags to append
a filename to the autogenerated URL. The GXML module has also been
blessed with the option to add image extensions to the URLs, like
<cimg> already could do.
-
Graphics tags: Several of the attributes that these tags accept refer
to files that are used for purposes such as textures or backgrounds. We now
properly register timestamps to detect changes for some attributes that
weren't handled earlier. If any of these resources are protected the RXML
parser will now answer with a HTTP Auth Required response to the browser to
force authentication instead of generating and caching an incorrect image.
-
Business graphics: Introduced a color-scheme attribute
to the <diagram> tag to autogenerate colors for
data.
-
E-mail module: Improved error handling in the
<email> tag and added a new attribute
error-variable. Also added an attribute
envelope-from to set the envelope sender address.
-
Added type attribute to <redirect> to
make it possible to do e.g. permanent redirects.
-
Added attribute http-time to <date>.
-
Added new mode safe-utf8 to <recode
from>. When provided, silently ignore any illegal UTF-8
sequences.
-
Added a showvar attribute to the <debug>
tag to be able to print out the value of a variable without
conversion in an unambiguous format (useful to figure out charset
conversion issues, for instance). The <debug> tag
also works in any type context.
-
COMPAT NOTE: A bug has been fixed in the
<contents> tag, used within <define>,
when both the value-of and result-set attributes
were used at the same time. The fix might have compatibility
implications in code that tried to work around the bug, but the old
behavior was too quirky to keep compatibility with on the 4.5 compat
level.
-
COMPAT NOTE: A type problem that could cause extra entity quoting
in <strlen> has been fixed and hence wrong length
reports. Old code might possibly depend on the broken behavior, so
it is kept on 4.5 compat level.
-
Administration interface: Updated the default logging format to
the Combined Log Format which extends Common Log Format with two
fields. The proposed format with extended usage info is changed
accordingly. It also uses $ip-number instead of
$host by default, to avoid the DNS overhead.
-
Administration interface: The Add modules page now shows
the site name, to avoid adding modules to the wrong site by
mistake.
-
Administration interface: A bit nicer sort order for threads in
Tasks/Debug Information/Thread backtrace, e.g. the backend
thread is always listed first.
-
Administration interface: Improved display of Unix sockets in
Tasks/Debug Information/Open files.
-
Administration interface: The binary distribution identifier is
now shown at the bottom of the pages.
-
Core: Optimizations in the protocol cache, and in the vary
callback system in particular.
-
Core: The image cache now allows protocol caching of
authenticated images, which is made possible by the new arg cache
implementation.
-
Core: Speed up accepting of connections.
-
Core: Improved the p-code codec to handle references to arbitrary
Pike modules.
-
Core: The sample start script in the tools directory now
has a "status" command to query whether the Roxen instance is
running or not. It can also be configured to handle several
instances by keeping their configuration directories in a special
"configuration collection" directory.
-
Core: Added an experimental mode where the RAM cache retention
policy is based on the time to create the entries. This is enabled
by the define TIME_BASED_CACHE.
-
Core: Log a warning if a background job takes more than one
minute.
-
Core: Roxen modules are now always loaded in the same order.
-
Core: There is now a bat file bin\mysql_client_nt.bat to
make it simpler to start a MySQL command line client against Roxen's
MySQL process on Windows.
-
RXML tags: The <nocache> tag now properly disables
protocol and client caching, just like the <cache>
tag does by default. It has also gotten the attributes
enable-client-cache and enable-protocol-cache that
works like in the <cache> tag, to control this
behavior.
-
RXML tags: <remove-cookie> no longer requires the
cookie to exist.
