MINI Sh3ll

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 <[email protected]>  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 <[email protected]>  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 <[email protected]>  Tue, 22 Jan 2008 18:50:08 -0500