Hello,

Debian's barnowl is 1.10-2 in every suite from bullseye to sid. Upstream
BarnOwl 1.10 was tagged in
2017; development continued on GitHub, and master is now 1f65aee
(2025-08-13), 73 commits later. I
would like the package to move to upstream master, or to 1.11 once it is
tagged (the upstream
maintainers are discussing a 1.11 release on barnowl-dev@mit.edu).

User-visible reasons:

- Logging was rewritten in Perl (BarnOwl::Logging): log file names are
built from sanitized message
  fields, logs can go to per-realm and per-protocol subdirectories, and
logging can be deferred and
  flushed periodically.
- The DES code uses the OpenSSL 1.1+ API, so it builds against current
libssl.
- AIM support was removed (the service shut down in 2017).
- Thread-safety and correctness fixes: reentrant time and string functions,
and a format string
  injection fix in owl_log_makemsg_main_thread.

I maintain a working package of master for amd64, built in CI from source
with checksums published:
https://forgejo.mit.edu/djbclark/barnowl-debian (currently
1.11~git20250813.1f65aee-5; it upgrades
1.10-2 cleanly). Its six bug-fix patches are offered upstream as
https://github.com/barnowl/barnowl/pull/190.

Master still has the bug I reported separately where barnowl exits with its
usage message at
startup on arm64 and other unsigned-char architectures, so a refresh should
carry that one-line fix
(https://github.com/barnowl/barnowl/pull/191) until upstream merges it.

I'm happy to help: patches against the Debian packaging on salsa, testing,
or co-maintenance if that
would be welcome.

Thanks,
Daniel JB Clark