opentracker has finally released a 1.0 version, after 18 years of development. The previous trunk-based development had no version, hence the 0.0~git... version scheme that was used in the Debian packaging until now.
The 1.0 version has been released as an opentracker_1.0.tar.bz2 tarball on 2025-01-01, but it does not correspond to a commit or a tag in its gitweb.
Keeping the git suffix in Debian
There has since been two commits on the master branch, so instead of importing a proper 1.0-1 version in Debian I have decided to keep the git suffix as these commits were not released in a patch release like 1.1. The new version scheme looks like this:
1.0+git20250425.b20b0b8-1
Note the 1.0+ used instead of the 0.0~, because there has been some commits on top of the 1.0 release.
FIFOs now available for hash whitelist
The packaged version in Debian uses a whitelist in /etc/opentracker/whitelist.txt to deny random people announce random torrents to your tracker. To allow a new hash, one currently had to put it as a new line in the whitelist file and reload the systemd unit, which will send a SIGHUP to read back the new allow list:
# systemctl reload opentracker.service
This new upstream version introduces two runtime FIFOs:
/var/run/opentracker/adder.fifo /var/run/opentrakcer/deleter.fifo
As the names suggest, writing to these FIFO files allows to add or remove hashes to the authorized list without having to send a SIGHUP and re-read the sometimes big whitelist.txt. However, the hashes modified via the FIFOs will not be persisted to disk and lost on service restart.
To make the changes persistent, one has to also store the hashes in /etc/opentracker/whitelist.txt so that when the service restarts it can load them from disk.
The FIFOs have been introduced as a performance improvement for big trackers that add and remove many hashes and where reading the whole list of allowed hashes each time can be time consuming and not optimal.