sendmail, 4th Edition

The RELEASE_NOTES File

Each release of sendmail is packaged with a file called RELEASE_NOTES, located in the top level of the source distribution. The RELEASE_NOTES file itemizes new features that have been added to each particular version of sendmail since version 8.1 (released in 1993). This file is very complete but, on the downside, can be difficult to parse.

Basically, the RELEASE_NOTES file is divided into sections, each of which deals with a separate release of sendmail. Each begins with a single line that contains the version number of the sendmail release, followed by a slash, followed by the version number of the configuration file release, followed by the date of the release. For example:

8.14.1/8.14.1  2007/04/03

Here, the second release of the V8.14 series (8.14.1) is indicated.^[30] The version and date are followed by sections that each document a change in the sendmail binary. Some sections are prefixed with a keyword and colon. For the most part, those keyword sections describe a change in something other than the binary^[31] and, for example, can look like this:

SECURITY: Some security matter was fixed, and the description of
        that fix will appear here.
This item describes a change made to the sendmail binary.
LIBMILTER: This documents a change made to one of the files in the
        libmilter directory.

The keywords and the meaning of each are shown in Table 2-2.

Table 2-2. RELEASE_NOTES file keywords

Keyword	Description
SECURITY:	This type of information is usually very important. ...