PyKota v1.26 is out !

You can download it from the usual place. The Official Debian, Ubuntu, RHEL4, RHEL5, FC6 and FC7 packages are ready, as well as the latest MegaPack.

Upgrade instructions :

No database change since v1.23 so the upgrade is really easy. You just have to double check the pykota/conf/pykota.conf.sample file for new configuration directives, and report them in your own configuration file.

Summary of changes :

• Introduced the snmperrormask directive in pykota.conf to control how SNMP errors are handled.
  Introduced the statusstabilizationdelay and statusstabilizationloops directives to control how SNMP and PJL hardware accounting has to be done.
• Introduced the usernamecase directive to control how the case of usernames has to be handled. This directive replaces and enhances the utolower directive, which remains supported for compatibility reasons, but which will disappear in a future release.
• Introduced the skipinitialwait directive to control if PyKota should wait or not for the printer being idle at the start of a job. Although the default setting currently is no, a future release will make it default to yes, since at the start of a job, the printer should be idle already because PyKota also waited for it to be idle at the end of the previous job. Setting this directive to yes should almost halve hardware accounting delays for which many people complained.
• Introduced the avoidduplicatebanners directive, to control if several successive print jobs by the same user should be separated with PyKota's banner pages or not.
• The cupspykota backend fails early instead of printing the job and failing later, whenever permissions are insufficient to read ~pykota/pykotadmin.conf
• The askconfirmation directive is not executed anymore if the user doesn't have enough credits to print.
• Commands launched through the overwrite_jobticket directive can now specify a reason why the job was denied or cancelled, by outputting a REASON= line the same way other values are expected.
• The dumpykota command line tool now accepts a --orderby command line option. The dumpykota.cgi CGI script includes a similar feature.
  
• The dumpykota command line tool now accepts start= and end= filters when dumping payments.
• The autopykota command line tool now accepts a --email command line option.
• The PJL accounting module was improved.
• pksetup can now install PyKota's files if needed.
• A problem causing pksetup to generate incorrect configuration files for PyKota was fixed.
• pkpgcounter's GC (grey vs color) pseudo colorspace is now supported in ink accounting mode.
• Minor bugs and packaging issues were fixed all over the place.
  

Thanks to :

• Matt Hyclak and Stefan Wold for their invaluable help and contributions.
• George Farris was gentle enough to contribute a graphical software designed to allow end users to move credits between a stored value smart card and PyKota's database using ITC Systems' smart card readers. This program is available in the pykota/contributed/ directory. Many many thanks to him.

The future :