[buildd-tools-devel] schroot-1.5.0 released

[Roger Leigh]

Hi folks,

I have released schroot version 1.5.0.  With the release of squeeze
imminent, and schroot 1.4.x being maintained for the lifetime of
squeeze as the stable release, 1.5.x will be maintained on the
master branch.  There's also a new distribution-1.5 branch for the
actual releases.

Currently, 1.5.0 is identical to 1.4.19, but with a few changes,
mainly obsoleting or removing features deprecated in 1.4.x releases.

* Major changes in 1.5.0:

  1) The deprecated options priority, run-setup-scripts and
     run-exec-scripts (all chroot types) and location ("plain" and
     "directory" chroot types) have been obsoleted and removed from
     the documentation.

  2) Source chroots no longer create a chroot with a -source suffix;
     the source: namespace should be used instead.  Likewise sessions
     are no longer present in the chroot: namespace, and are only
     found in the session: namespace.  This means the fully-qualified
     name must be used to refer to sessions except when performing
     actions which use session: as the default namespace.

  3) Support for zip file archives has been removed.  zip was not able
     to archive named pipes and device nodes, and so was not usable
     for chroot archival.

  4) AUTH_VERBOSITY is no longer set in setup scripts.  Please use
     VERBOSE instead.  VERBOSITY replaced and deprecated
     AUTH_VERBOSITY in version 1.4.5.

This release will be uploaded to Debian experimental.  Note that the
currently released sbuild versions depend upon some of the deprecated
features, namely the old chroot names.  I will update sbuild soon to
work only with the new names (which are currently supported in squeeze,
and hence soon in stable).  sbuild currently can handle namespaces,
but strips them off since it's currently backward compatible with
pre-1.4 versions of schroot to support lenny.  Once squeeze is
released, we can make use of the new namespace semantics.

• Do you have any changes you would like in schroot?

• Any new features required?

• Anything else?

Now would be a good time to make any feature requests, changes etc.
known!  The 1.5.x series will be a set of development releases
aiming for a 1.6.x stable release series targetting wheezy.  My own
small set of ideas includes:

• Replacement of long UUIDs in session names with shorter six-letter
  sequences generated via mkstemp() or equivalent.  This makes them
  easier to handle, and will prevent some FreeBSD breakage with long
  mount paths.
• Upgrading of the file format to an ISC-style format like used in
  APT.  We can of course retain the old parser for backward
  compatibility.  I'd like for the ability to attach arbitrary
  metadata to chroots so that sbuild can select different chroots
  e.g. for security or non-free autobuilding.
• Allow use of virtualisation technologies other than chroot(2).
  I'm thinking about:
  · per-process namespaces
  · cgroups
  · vservers
  · kvm/qemu [would also allow emulated architectures to be used]
• Running schroot as a service rather than a setuid executable, and
  communicating via a socket.  This would be a requirement for
  per-process namespaces, since the current model doesn't allow for
  attaching to another namespace; you must inherit it.
• Add an --arch option or --distribution option to allow selection
  of a chroot with specific features.  Or --feature.  This would
  allow sbuild to select a chroot with desired properties rather
  than mangling them into the chroot name.  Currently we require
  the distribution and architecture and fall back to distribution
  only, but this doesn't really scale to adding more features.
• Restore exec scripts in addition to setup scripts?  There is a
  script which makes use of it in either the BTS or contrib dir.
• Add different levels of verbosity to display more or less levels
  of detail with --verbose or --quiet.

Any other ideas or suggestions would be appreciated.  Don't worry
about it being too esoteric, specialised or whatever--I'm willing
to entertain all ideas!

I haven't included any diffstat or shortlog for this release, because
the history is tightly interwoven with the schroot-1.4 branch, so it's
misleadingly large; the actual diff is very small.  There may be some
options which can eliminate the duplicated cherry-picked commits I'm
not aware of.


Regards,
Roger

-- 
  .''`.  Roger Leigh
 : :' :  Debian GNU/Linux             http://people.debian.org/~rleigh/
 `. `'   Printing on GNU/Linux?       http://gutenprint.sourceforge.net/
   `-    GPG Public Key: 0x25BFB848   Please GPG sign your mail.
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 197 bytes
Desc: Digital signature
URL: <http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/buildd-tools-devel/attachments/20110116/ae417057/attachment.pgp>