Werner’s own blurbs

After 2 release candidates and 3 months work we have today released version 1.4.1 of GnuPG.

This is mainly a bug fixing release but comes with a souple of minor changes and for the first time with a graphical installer for Windows. Working on the latter took quite some of my time but I believe it was worth the time. That installer will be improved over time.

We still have a couple of other things in the queue and will start working on them right now to pepare for a 1.4.2 release.

Due to changes in Linux 2.6, gpg’s internal CCID driver did not worked anymore reliable. Finally I took the time to browse over the USB stack code and to learn the basics of USB. Despite several hours of debugging, I was still not able to locate the bug there. Apparently it is a problem with the SCM readers depending on the way they are accessed. It seems to be pure luck that it worked on 2.4. The fixes I implemented are to check for card presence before powering up the card, progressive timeout retries and resetting the device right before releasing the interface. So far it works for me. Its in the CVS and I try to add a patch file my home directory over here.

Expect a release tomorrow.

It turned out that using keys of certain lengths which are not a multiple of the 8 bytes may cause a segv only under Windows. Timo tracked the problem down to the generation of the session key and I am now looking for the real cause …

After quite some hours of debugging using plain old printfs and staring at the output, I found a long standing bug in the secmem_realloc function which exhibit itself only with certain request sizes due to padding and blockreuse issues. This fixes the 1504 bug I mentioned yesterday (well due to problems with the blogging code the date of that entry is possible wrong).