We are happy to announce the release of Bcfg2 1.3.2. It is available for download at:

​ftp://ftp.mcs.anl.gov/pub/bcfg

This release fixes a great number of bugs in 1.3.1, but it also comes with many fun and exciting new features. Please read the release notes thoroughly -- there are lots of good bits in here!

The following are user-facing changes:

• In order to run an Action in a shell and use shell features (like && chaining, pipes, etc.), you must now specify shell="true" in the Action tag: ​http://docs.bcfg2.org/server/plugins/generators/rules.html#action-tag
• The RMI calls to set debugging on the FAM driver have changed from set_fam_debug and toggle_fam_debug to <driver>.set_debug and <driver>.toggle_debug (e.g., Inotify.toggle_debug)

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

• New bootstatus attribute in Service tags allows the specification of a boot-time status separately from the current status attribute. This allows for more fine-grained control over, e.g., services that are really just boot scripts: ​http://docs.bcfg2.org/server/plugins/generators/rules.html#service-tag
• New multiprocessing server core and bcfg2-test
• VCS Path entries using SVN can now take revision='latest'
• VCS Path entries using Git can now take a refname as the revision. Other improvements as well.
• New GroupLogic plugin lets you write arbitrary Genshi to generate group memberships: ​http://docs.bcfg2.org/server/plugins/connectors/grouplogic.html
• Added support for wildcard XInclude: ​http://docs.bcfg2.org/server/plugins/grouping/metadata.html#wildcard-xinclude
• Svn plugin: New options to specify username and password, trust SSL certificates
• Added feature to set default authentication type globally
• Greatly improved the code for executing external commands during client runs
• Packages plugin exposes get_config() function to get configs for other hosts, useful for generating configs for other applications (e.g., mock)
• Added option to force server to block until all FAM events are processed
• Lots of improvements to bcfg2-profile-templates.py tool
• POSIXGroup tags now support better <MemberOf group="foo"/> syntax
• New tool to facilitate migrating from Probes XML backend to database backend
• New config option to set arbitrary database options
• bcfg2-yum-helper: Handle and log errors better; produce fewer errors; avoid database locking bug that could result in hung helpers
• Various debugging improvements
• Various IPv6 fixes
• Various fixes for bcfg2-info: better help messages, better packageresolve, option parsing fixes, fixed bcfg2-info config
• bcfg2-lint improvements, fixes, and new tests
• Cleaned up spec file, Debian and Solaris builds
• Fixed handling of Ctrl-C in severl places
• Fixed schemas that required more attributes than necessary when using the Defaults plugin
• Fixed .cat and .diff behavior with host-specific base files
• Fixed Portage version verification
• Fixed return values from init scripts
• Fixed calculation of average times in bcfg2-admin perf
• Lots of code cleanup
• Many other bug fixes

Special thanks to all of our contributors for 1.3.1: Alexander Sulfrian, Dan Foster, DongInn Kim, Duncan Hutty, Jake Davis, Jason Kincl, Jon Norman, Luke Cyca, Michael Fenn, Phil Miller, and Tim Laszlo