PuTTY 0.61 Released

drmacinyasha writes "Simon Tatham announced Tuesday the official release of PuTTY 0.61 after four years of development. It brings a number of bug fixes and improvements, such as GSSAPI SSH-2 authentication, significantly faster SSH key exchanges, and even support for Windows 7's jump lists. Downloads are available from the project's homepage."

Comments

Puzzles

[gringer]

And for those people who don't have the intellectual desire to tinker away at a shell, Simon Tatham has a few puzzles for you:

http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzzles/

I accept no responsibility for loss of work months due to the use of these puzzles.

Re:Self-deprecating version numbers are the suck

[CrazyBusError]

I believe there are other reasons for not going to version 1.

Hopefully the esteemed Mr Tatham won't mind if I quote him directly, but in 2007 he wrote this about why puTTY wasn't version 1 yet:

But that's not primarily what's holding back a 1.0 release. The real thing I want to do first is to sort out the data storage: there are quite a few features on the wish list which would require a revamp of that, such as

- ability to store some settings in HKEY_CURRENT_USER and others in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, so that a sysadmin could set up some default saved sessions and a default host key cache which would then be the starting point for each user's personal configuration

- inheritable saved sessions (so that when I change, say, my font preference in Default Settings it automatically propagates to all my other sessions _except_ those in which I've specifically asked for a non-default font)

- storing configuration in a disk file as an alternative to the registry (so that people can carry around PuTTY plus their config file on a USB stick)

- ability to configure all PuTTY's options from the command line (rather than having to do a lot of them by the cumbersome method of creating a saved session and using -load).

Now I'm not saying I want to have _implemented_ all those features before 1.0, but I want to have made a commitment to a data storage format which is capable of supporting them. Currently PuTTY's data storage only tries to be upward- compatible, meaning that you can upgrade PuTTY and it'll still work with your old settings. Use an older PuTTY with newer settings, and you're on your own. My goal is that within the 1.0 series, the data storage should be compatible in _both_ directions. (Not because I anticipate people deliberately downgrading PuTTY, although it's been known occasionally, but because I can easily imagine people using different versions on two machines which happen to be sharing a network-stored configuration.)