The second prerelease for Bcfg2 1.3.0 is now available at:

​ftp://ftp.mcs.anl.gov/pub/bcfg

Bcfg2 1.3.0pre2 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 (and ReleaseAnnouncement/1.3.0pre1) 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 user-facing changes:

• Changed the 'perms' POSIX attribute to 'mode' for better consistency. A tool located at tools/upgrade/1.3/perms_to_mode.py can assist you in migrating your old configurations. Due to this change, you will need to enable the POSIXCompat plugin to allow older clients to talk to a 1.3 server.
• The server now requires python-daemon.
• The YUMng client tool has been renamed to YUM and the RPMng client tool has been renamed to RPM.
• The Bcfg2 client now exits on Probe failure by default.
• The DBStats plugin has been superceded by a new Reporting plugin and subsystem. If using the DBStats plugin, you will need to migrate your data by running the script located at tools/upgrade/1.3/migrate_dbstats.py. In addition, you will need to change DBStats to Reporting in bcfg2.conf.
• The cherrypy backend requires an unreleased version of cherrypy due to a major bug (​https://bitbucket.org/cherrypy/cherrypy/pull-request/14/fixed-bug-with-post-data-over-16k-with-ssl).
• The Svn2 and Svn plugins have been merged into a single "Svn" plugin. The new plugin supports both PySVN, or, if not available, using svn commands.

The following features have been deprecated and will be removed in a future release:

• Packages 'magic groups'
• YUM24 tool
• Paths with perms='inherit'
• FAM filemonitor

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

• Numerous bug fixes
• Tickets fixed
  • #1124
  • #1121
  • #1052
• Fleshed out unit tests for a lot of the server code (Thanks Chris!)
• Server-side client metadata object caching (​http://docs.bcfg2.org/dev/server/caching.html)
• Documentation improvements
• Update reports to work with Django 1.4
• New bcfg2-info automatch command
• Encryption improvements
  • made algorithm configurable
• New bcfg2-selinux RPM subpackage
• Allow server to drop privileges
• Reporting system overhaul (Thanks Tim!)
  • New experimental redis transport
• Launchd support for OS X 10.7 and 10.8
• Solaris manifest files
• New 'bcfg2-info probes' subcommand to list probes for a client
• Support for JSON and YAML properties files
• New bcfg2_local.py tool to run bcfg2 against a local specification
• Git plugin improvements:
  • Support for GitPython and dulwich libraries, and a direct command interface
  • Git.Update RMI to allow updating the local working copy

Prerelease 2 received contributions from the following people:

• John Morris
• Andy Brody
• Christopher 'm4z' Holm
• Chris Brinker
• Luke Cyca
• Phillip Steinbachs
• Jake Davis