Vacation is the automatic mail answering program found with many Unix
implementations such as SunOS and IBM AIX.

This is my vacation port to Linux. It is derived from the vacation program
found on agate.berkeley.edu in the 386bsd directory on Nov 16, 1993. The
original program was written by Eric Allman in 1983 and is copyrighted by
the Regents of the UCB. The copyright disclaimer is valid for this
distribution as well, i.e. this version is provided `as is', and I shall not
be liable for any damage, data loss or earthquakes in the bay area.

Version 1.1 was a security-patched version. The former version 1.0 had
a bad security bug which Olaf Kirch reported to the CERT mailing list (after
giving me a hint :-). Please DO NOT LONGER USE vacation-1.0! 

As far as Copyrights are concerned, the original parts of vacation are
under the BSD copyright whereas I place my changed under the GPL (see
file COPYING in the directory).

I tried to make this port look just like the version found with SunOS 4.1.x.
There are minor differences, however, it resembles more the Sun version than
the original 386bsd source.

Differences to the 386bsd version: 
- usage of the GNU dbm database library (libdbm.a) instead of whatever
  was used in 386bsd. I don't know 386bsd well, so there was no
  chance to avoid this change. You won't bother, probably. 
- implementation of the `-j' option which suppresses checking of the
  "To:" and "Cc:" fields.
- the 386bsd version didn't replace the string "$SUBJECT" in the
  .vacation.msg file if present :-(. Well, this version does.
- the other options are named as and work just like the Sun version's,
  except:

Differences to the Sun version:
- the `-t' option only allows for an adjustment in steps of days. Not
  that it would have been to difficult to implement the whole armada of
  Sun's option, but I considered this useful enough. 
- Instead of the files .vacation.dir and .vacation.pag, respectively,
  this version uses a single file .vacation.db. The dbm_open() call used
  in the Sun and AIX versions hard-links the former files, so I dind't
  find any reason why to keep up this configuration.

There's a new option `-r' which checks if there is a "Reply-To:" header in
the incoming mail, and if there is, its entry overrides the "From:" entry.
This can be useful in those cases where users have `replyto' files for their
newsreaders for specific reasons. Plus, if someone intends to receive mail
at another location, he/she will issue "Reply-To:" as well. Feel free to
argue for or against this issue.

Unpack the package as follows

mkdir -p /usr/src		# if not already present :-)
chdir /usr/src
gzip -dc <path>/vacation-1.1.tgz | tar xpvf -

A simple `make install' (install-aout is no longer supported as of version
1.2) should install binary in /usr/bin and the manpages in /usr/man/man*,
respectively.  If you choose different directories, edit the Makefile.

There are no prerequisites as far as the compiler and the library
versions are concerned. You should be able to compile vacation with
older versions as well. However, you'll need the libdbm.a library and
the corresponding header files which should be shipped with most (if
not all) Linux distributions (at least it was with SLS 1.01). I compiled
the supplied binaries with GCC 2.6.3 (ELF). They are dynamically linked
against libc-5.4.38 and libgdbm-2.0.0. If you don't have those libraries,
either install libc-5 or recompile the binaries which should be fairly
easy.

In order to call an external shell, sendmail(8) and vi(1) correctly,
vacation #includes paths.h which should thus reflect your configuration.
Please adjust the corresponding entries in paths.h (usually found in
/usr/include).

vacation.c is still full of "#ifdef DEBUG" statements which are subject to
vanish in a later version. However, if you do some testing, the file
`/tmp/vacation.log' can be helpful. The function printd() is intended to log
into this file. Apart from that, vacation syslogs into the LOG_MAIL facility.

I apologize for not having put too many comments into the source. I felt
that for the moment, the source is very understandable itself (as you always
do when having played around with some source code for a while).

If you want to use Jeff Uphoff's "vaclook" script, simply strip everything
that isn't needed and change the permissions as appropriate. Perl5 and
dynamic loading is needed.

I'd appreciate some further testing and any useful hints concerning
vacation. Please feel free to mail me any comments.

Sean Rima (thecivvie@softhome.net), 2 Dec 1999 (Yeah we are Y2000 clean!)