Re: OpenSSH HPN

On Thu, 12 Nov 2015, Dewayne Geraghty wrote:

> Heimdal is (and has been for some time) undergoing constant development.
> For reasons unknown, they do not perform releases.  I am aware of updates
> from heimdal that are being applied to the samba project (in fact some of
> the samba developers are also feeding into heimdal).  The latest discussion
> was that the heimdal project are going to release a 1.7 "sometime",
> skipping 1.6 completely.

Things seem to have slowed down a lot since the lead Heimdal developer got
hired for Apple.  They have Apple-internal changes that don't necessarily
make their way back to the public project right away, and he is quite
busy.  There is no one who is employed to be a Heimdal release manager,
and the main developers all have other projects -- putting out a release
takes a fair bit of energy.  MIT employs developers whose job descriptions
include being the krb5 release manager, so there is financial support for
putting out regular releases.

Heimdal has changed plans to a 1.7 release because certain Linux
distributions packaged a snapshot of the 1.6 tree (to support Samba, as I
understand it), but then Heimdal development continued so that what would
be in the next release would not really reflect what was already deployed
using the 1.6 label.  As I understand it, there are still a couple
bugfixes/features that are considered to be blockers for the 1.7 release
that have not been implemented yet, and since the developers in question
are being paid to work on other things, there is no real timeline for the
release.


-Ben Kaduk