Re: SA 3.2

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Stefan G. Weichinger wrote:

> Any news regarding upgrading to SA 3.2 on production
servers running Maia?
> 
> Positive/negative experiences?

It's still not something I'd recommend yet for production
sites; hold
off until 3.2.1 for that.  The usual problem with any
".0" release is
that these tend to include brand-new features that haven't
been widely
tested (despite being available to beta-testers for months),
so the
/real/ beta test only begins when the final release occurs.

Specifically, there are some issues with the new sa-compile
tool that
comes with SpamAssassin 3.2.0.  This new version of SA
precompiles its
rules to improve performance, but that has led to some minor
complications:

(1) FreeBSD users in particular have trouble with sa-compile
due to the
fact that the "re2c" tool it requires is buggy in
most ports; version
0.12.0 or later is required, but most ports only contain
0.10.x or
0.11.x.  You can always compile your own re2c of course, but
if you're a
FreeBSD user you might prefer to wait until the ports
maintainers update
to 0.12.0.

(2) This new version of SA uses a "normalized"
character set (UTF-8) for
its text-based rules, which is very useful for being able to
catch
characters in non-Western character sets.  Unfortunately
this means that
all of the text-based rules need to be recoded to UTF-8, and
while this
was done for the standard SpamAssassin rules, it has not
been done yet
for third-party rules (e.g. SARE).  The SARE rule developers
are working
on recoding their rules as we speak, but with thousands of
such strings
to recode it could take them a while.  In the meantime,
those rules that
are not recoded will not work with SA 3.2.0.  A workaround
involves
adding "use bytes;" to the Message.pm file (right
after "use
warnings;"), for those who are determined to get
something working in
the meantime.

Apart from sa-compile issues, there are some other minor
glitches:

(1) One of the DNSBL (actually a DNSWL) rules for dnswl.org
was omitted.
 Add:

 header __RCVD_IN_DNSWL
eval:check_rbl('dnswl-firsttrusted','list.dnswl.org.')

to your local.cf file until this gets corrected in 3.2.1;

(2) There's a small bug in Mail::SPF that causes it to check
the version
numbers of its prerequisites incorrectly, such that it
reports errors
even when you've got the right prerequisites.  This one may
be fixed
already, so be sure to get the latest version (2.005 or
later should be
fixed).  If you're stuck using 2.004, this patch will
correct the problem:

 --- mail-spf-perl-2.004.orig/Build.PL
 +++ mail-spf-perl-2.004/Build.PL
  -62,7 +62,7 
          Module::Build   => '0.26',
          Test::More      => 0,
          Net:NS::Reso
lver::Programmable
 -                        => qv('0.002.1')->numify,
 +                        => qv('0.002.1'),
      },
      script_files    => [
          'bin/spfquery'

(3) Some people are reporting slower performance under
3.2.0, and
there's some dispute over the cause of this degradation. 
The SA devs
explain that there are a lot more rules with this release,
which is
naturally going to impact performance; however this is also
the reason
that sa-compile was introduced, and from other reports
sa-compile seems
to offset the additional rules nicely, which suggests the
slowdowns are
caused by something else.  Mark Martinec's theory is that
the new
character set normalization may be connected to the
problem,
particularly if some of the text strings are being flagged
as UTF-8
(Perl's string operations are much slower when dealing with
UTF-8
characters).

In general, though, these are just "growing pains"
for a ".0" release,
and within a few weeks they'll likely all be resolved.  If
you're
adventurous and willing to wade through traffic on the
SpamAssassin-Users list to keep up on the latest
fixes/workarounds, you
should feel free to dive in now and help shake loose the
remaining bugs.
 If you're looking for a drop-in replacement for 3.1.8
though, you're
better off waiting for 3.2.1.

- --
Robert LeBlanc <rjlrenaissoft.com>
Renaissoft, Inc.
Maia Mailguard <http://www.maiamail
guard.com/>

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Re: SA 3.2

Thread: Re: SA 3.2