[squid-announce] Squid 6.0.1 beta is available

[Amos Jeffries]

The Squid Software Foundation is very pleased to announce the
availability of the Squid-6.0.1 beta release!


This new 6.x series of Squid brings useful new features and changes
providing improved performance over earlier release series.

More detailed descriptions of the major new features are available in
the release notes and wiki:
   <http://www.squid-cache.org/Versions/v6/RELEASENOTES.html>
   <https://wiki.squid-cache.org/Releases/Squid-6>

Detailed lists of the ./configure build and squid.conf changes can also
be found in the release notes.

This code is released as beta for wider testing purposes and potential
use. There are no more planned alterations to the existing features,
./configure options or squid.conf options.


This release adds a dependency on C++17 support in any compiler used to
build Squid. GCC 8+ and Clang 8+ are known to have working C++17 support
and are usable. Older compilers will no longer build successfully.


This Squid version takes a major departure from the policy of providing
a working proxy "out of the box" for new installations. Network security
is now given a higher priority and fresh installs of Squid will not pass
most types of traffic until explicitly configured to do so. This policy
change is enacted by new squid.conf default configuration:

   http_access allow localhost
   http_access deny to_localhost
   http_access deny to_linklocal
   # http_access allow localnet

These changes only affect the default squid.conf and new installs.
Upgraded installations will continue to use their previous settings.
More details in the squid.conf documentation.


Squid now supports the Cache-Status HTTP header introduced by RFC 9211.
This HTTP header replaces/X-Cache/  and/X-Cache-Lookup/  which are no longer
emitted by Squid.
Any tools or management systems relying on those/X-/* headers need to
be upgraded to work with the new standardized header.


Major features dropped:

  * Gopher protocol support

With this change, Gopher requests will be handled like any other request
with an unknown (to Squid) protocol. For example, HTTP requests with
/gopher:///  URL scheme result in ERR_UNSUP_REQ.

Default Squid configuration still considers TCP port 70 safe. The
corresponding Safe_ports ACL rule has not been removed.


  * Outdated OS and compiler support

With the move to C++17 older compilers will no longer be able to compile
Squid code. Toolchain support for these compilers has been dropped. Also,
toolchain support for OS too old to run a required C++17 compiler have
been removed.


  * Outdated Tools

A number of outdated or otherwise broken tools have been removed from the
packaged Squid sources.
See the release notes for a complete list.



All users are encouraged to give this Squid release a test run as soon
as time permits. All feedback welcome.


Please refer to the release notes at
<http://www.squid-cache.org/Versions/v6/RELEASENOTES.html>  if and when
you are ready to make the switch to Squid-6

This new release can be downloaded from our HTTP or FTP servers

   <http://www.squid-cache.org/Versions/v6/>
   <ftp://ftp.squid-cache.org/pub/squid/>
   <ftp://ftp.squid-cache.org/pub/archive/6/>

or the mirrors. For a list of mirror sites see

   <http://www.squid-cache.org/Download/http-mirrors.html>
   <http://www.squid-cache.org/Download/mirrors.html>

If you encounter any issues with this release please file a bug report.
   <https://bugs.squid-cache.org/>

Amos Jeffries