= 1.3.0 Prerelease 1 Release Announcement =

The first prerelease for Bcfg2 1.3.0 is now available at:

ftp://ftp.mcs.anl.gov/pub/bcfg

Bcfg2 1.3.0pre1 is a prerelease, and contains many new features, including some that are backwards-incompatible with Bcfg2 1.2.x and earlier.  Please read the release notes thoroughly.  The code is fairly stable, but this is a prerelease and as such is not likely suitable for general production deployment.  That said, please help us test the release in non- and preproduction environments.

The following are major, backwards-incompatible user-facing changes:

  * Reworked service modes to make them more consistent and granular. A tool located at tools/upgrade/1.3/service_modes.py can assist in migrating your old configurations.  Due to this change, a Bcfg2 1.3 server will work with Bcfg2 1.2 (and earlier) clients with the !ServiceCompat plugin enabled, but a Bcfg2 1.2 (or earlier) server will ''not'' work with Bcfg2 1.3 clients. (http://docs.bcfg2.org/dev/server/plugins/generators/rules.html#service-mode-specification)
  * Moved configuration for several plugins (Rules, Packages) into base bcfg2.conf file.  Reworked database configuration for DBStats to make it more accessible to other plugins.  A tool located at tools/upgrade/1.3/migrate_configs.py can assist in migrating your old configurations.

The following plugins and features have been deprecated, and will be removed in a future release, likely 1.4:

  * Accounts
  * Hostbase
  * Snapshots
  * Statistics
  * TCheetah
  * TGenshi
  * info and :info files
  * .cat and .diff files

The following deprecated plugins have been removed:

  * BB
  * SGenshi
  * Svcmgr

The following is a non-exhaustive list of fixes and features:

  * Numerous big fixes
  * Documentation fixes
  * bcfg2-reports web interface improvements
  * inotify filemonitor (drop-in replacement for gamin/fam)
  * DB2 support for reports
  * Encryption support
    * Ability to store encrypted Cfg/TGenshi/TCheetah files (http://docs.bcfg2.org/dev/server/plugins/generators/cfg.html#encrypted-files)
    * Properties element encryption (http://docs.bcfg2.org/dev/server/plugins/connectors/properties.html#encrypted-properties-data)
    * bcfg2-crypt utility for encrypting Properties and Cfg files
  * New bcfg2-test tool for building all client configurations and verifying that they contain no failures. (Raul Cuza/Calen Pennington)
  * New tools
    * SVN postcommit log message script
    * template render benchmarking script
  * Support for on-the-fly or on-demand Cfg file syntax checking (http://docs.bcfg2.org/dev/server/plugins/generators/cfg.html#content-validation)
  * Much improved Genshi error handling
  * New Properties convenience method, XMLMatch(), and automatch attribute allow you to write structured Properties files and then automatically access only data apropos to a client in templates rendered for that client (http://docs.bcfg2.org/dev/server/plugins/connectors/properties.html#automatch)
  * Implemented "service removal" (via status attribute #1075)
  * Improvements to bcfg2-admin interface
  * OpenCSW client tool
  * Support for Puppet External Node Classifiers (http://docs.bcfg2.org/dev/server/plugins/connectors/puppetenc.html)
  * SELinux support (http://docs.bcfg2.org/dev/server/selinux.html)
  * IPV6 support
  * New, optional, higher-performance !CherryPy 3.2-based server core (http://docs.bcfg2.org/dev/server/backends.html)
  * Ability to query by bundle name in bcfg2-admin query
  * Metadata enhancements
    * Client tags, nested Group tags, and negated Group and Client tags in groups.xml (http://docs.bcfg2.org/dev/server/plugins/grouping/metadata.html#metadata-groups-xml)
    * Database-backed plugin for storage (http://docs.bcfg2.org/dev/server/plugins/grouping/metadata.html#clients-database)
  * Ability to store probe data in database instead of probed.xml (http://docs.bcfg2.org/dev/server/plugins/probes/index.html#data-storage)
  * Support for ACLs (on filesystems that support them) (http://docs.bcfg2.org/dev/server/plugins/generators/rules.htmlacls)
  * New !TemplateHelper plugin allows storing and versioning Python snippets used in templates along with the rest of your Bcfg2 specification (http://docs.bcfg2.org/dev/server/plugins/connectors/templatehelper.html)
  * Added lots of unit tests and started using http://travis-ci.org for Continuous Integration testing
  * Improvements to XInclude handling (includes-of-includes, relative include fixes, XInclude support in more files)
  * Fixed and made configurable XML-RPC retries

As usual, a monstrously huge shout-out to our many contributors; for 1.3.0 we received contributes from many people, including:

  * Arto Jantunen
  * Brent Bloxam
  * Calen Pennington
  * Calvin Cheng
  * Christopher 'm4z' Holm
  * Dan Foster
  * !DongInn Kim
  * Fabian Affolter
  * Jack Neely
  * Jake Davis
  * Jeroen Dekkers
  * John 'Skip' Reddy
  * Jonathan Billings
  * Luke Cyca
  * Matt Kemp
  * Raul Cuza
  * Tim Laszlo
  * Torsten Rehn