View file File name : README.Debian Content :OpenBSD netcat for Debian ------------------------- Merge with upstream again, now it links against -lresov and -lbsd. The former one is from libc, and the latter provides a good strlcpy(). Now the package has a much saner dependency to make its way into base system. A lot of bug fixes and some new features are also applied. For record, the reason of not implementing features like -c or -e in this cat is about security. These options enable anyone on the system to open port and execute arbitrary command on local host from remote very easily, which is not desired for ordinary multi-user systems. If you do need such function, please try nc.traditional or nc6. -- Aron Xu <aron@debian.org> Wed, 15 Feb 2012 01:39:04 +0800 This package has been rebased on OpenBSD's implementation of netcat. The code has been massively cleaned up, and important functionality has been added. -- Soren Hansen <soren@ubuntu.com> Tue, 15 Jan 2008 10:38:34 +0100 The OpenBSD implementation has been split from netcat-traditional for two reasons (not counting sentimental value): 1. Netcat should be part of the base system; OpenBSD netcat uses strlcpy. While there is already a perfectly good implementation of strlcpy in Debian, it is part of glib, which is not included in base. 2. Packages should not be replaced under users' feet; a transitional package will be provided for lenny so that users can note the new package and switch if they wish. You may install this package alongside netcat-traditional; they both use the alternatives system for nc(1) as well as the deprecated alias netcat(1). Other implementations of netcat with compatible command line options are encouraged to also do so and provide the virtual package "netcat". The following features from netcat-traditional will not be added to this package: * The -e and -c options (This should be done by redirecting the appropriate file descriptors, not within netcat. How to do so should be better documented.) * Printing "connection refused" messages when -v is not specified (because there is only one level of verbosity in this netcat, and that message is primarily what the option is for.) Anything else that netcat-traditional does that this package doesn't is a bug. Wherever possible, command-line compatibility with the BSDs and Fedora is desired, but it should be easy to use netcat-openbsd as a "drop-in" replacement for netcat-traditional as well. -- Decklin Foster <decklin@red-bean.com> Tue, 22 Jan 2008 18:50:08 -0500