Drupal 6.17, a maintenance release fixing issues reported through the bug tracking system, is now available for download. There are no security fixes in this release. Upgrading your existing Drupal 6 sites is recommended. For more information about the Drupal 6.x release series, consult the Drupal 6.0 release announcement.
Highlights of changes in this release include improvements of session cookie handling, better processing of big XML-RPC payloads, improved PostgreSQL compatibility, better PHP 5.3 and PHP 4 compatibility, improved Japanese support in search module, better browser compatibility of CSS and JS aggregation and improved logging for login failures. An incompatibility of Drupal 6.16′s new lock subsystem with some contributed modules was also resolved. In total there were about 55 patches committed to improve Drupal 6.
The full list of changes between the 6.16 and 6.17 releases can be found by reading the 6.17 release notes. A complete list of all bug fixes in the stable DRUPAL-6 branch can be found at http://drupal.org/project/cvs/3060/?branch=DRUPAL-6.
Given enough bug fixes (not just bug reports) more maintenance releases will be made available.
Incompatible changes
Drupal 6.17 introduces the following incompatible changes.
Session handling
Drupal 6.17 changes the way session cookies are handled. Most people don’t need to have this setting set, but if you have an explicit $cookie_domain set in settings.php, verify that it is set to a sensible value:
'example.com'if you want sessions to apply to theexample.comdomain, and none of its sub-domains (especially notwww.example.com),'www.example.com'if you want sessions to apply to thewww.example.comdomain, and none of its sub-domains nor parent domains (especially notexample.com),'.example.com'if you want sessions to apply to theexample.comdomain and all its subdomains (www.example.com,mydomain.example.com, etc.).
