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