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 [wiki: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  * The DBStats plugin has been superceded by a new Reporting plugin and subsystem.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