0.8.19 Release

What is Elektra?

Elektra solves a non-trivial issue: how to abstract configuration in a way that software can be integrated and reconfiguration can be automated. Elektra solves this problem in a holistic way. Read why Elektra for an explanation of why such a solution is necessary. It can be seen as a virtual file system for configuration files.

Highlights

• more tutorials and getting started guides
• new Ruby bindings
• cleanup of core (only 124K for main library on Debian/amd64)

More Tutorials

Elektra already has an open and welcoming environment, with many interesting discussions. It is our interest that we keep it that way. To make this a bit more formal we added a code of conduct.

But without good introductions, it is easy to get lost in such a large initiative like Elektra. Thus we focused on writing great tutorials for this release!

• We wrote an overview readme
• We wrote new tutorials about mounting and validation (thanks to Christoph Weber)
• We wrote a readme to shell recorder transpiler which allows us to execute tutorials and verify that the examples in them work. (thanks to Thomas Waser)
• Lua and Python plugins got tutorials and better explanations! (Thanks to Marvin Mall)
• The doxygen docu now also uses links to directories, thanks to Kurt Micheli!

Thanks to Armin Wurzinger for pointing to areas of improvement. A big thanks to Marvin Mall, Kurt Micheli, Christoph Weber and Thomas Waser!

If you like the tutorials, we would love to read from you. Please feel free to start a discussion or ask a question. We also added a FAQ and updated CONTRIBUTING

Ruby Bindings

We now provide Ruby bindings for Elektra. The bindings are based on the C++ bindings and are generated by SWIG. A strong focus was put on a good integration with standard Ruby features and conventions, such as naming conventions, predicates, key and meta data iteration…

A short introduction shows some basic usage scenarios. More detailed examples can be found in the examples directory.

A big thanks to Bernhard Denner!

Cleanup of Core

Following methods were hidden (static) or removed:

• mount* methods
• trie* methods
• backend*
• split*
• keyGetParentNameSize
• keyGetParentName

These are dozens of methods and it was required to adapt the unit tests to work with the hidden methods.

A big thanks to Kurt Micheli!

Usability

• Improved many error messages
• spelling
• be more friendly to the user
• capitalization
• mention sudo !!
• kdb set: do not print what was not done
• kdb editor handles non-modified files (will not do anything)
• Be more chatty about what kdb does, can be disabled with -q or /sw/elektra/kdb/#0/current/quiet.
• Furthermore, -v now tells even more details (e.g. kdb-import outputs the key about to import)

Plugins

New

• c plugin generates C code that represents configuration. This is useful for unit tests or if you need to have hard-coded fallback configuration in your C application.
• base64 plugin allows you to encode binary data. This is especially handy in combination with the crypto plugin to avoid problems with non-printable characters in configuration files. (Thanks to Peter Nirschl)
• fcrypt plugin allows you to fully encrypt configuration files. They are only decrypted when applications access them. (Thanks to Peter Nirschl)
• required plugin rejects every key that is not required by an application.
• simple spec lang allows you to define metadata for enum and required in a more compact way.

Major Enhancements

• simpleini got a configurable format in which it will read and write configuration files. For example, one can use format=% -> % to have key -> value.
• enum got support for multi-enums, i.e., multiple separated values within one value. The error reporting was improved, too. (Thanks to Thomas Waser)
• glob accepts a list of named flags instead of an integer value and aborts matching after first hit. (Thanks to Felix Berlakovich)
• hosts now only accepts ipv4 and ipv6 keys. (Thanks to Felix Berlakovich)

Development

In the perpetual effort to improve software quality, we made several improvements: (This information is mainly intended for Elektra’s developers.)

• A new logger encourages developers to write more comments (ELEKTRA_LOG)
• ELEKTRA_ASSERT prints better messages on failure and does not need && trick.
• get rid of previous VERBOSE macro at many places.
• Many assertions were added in the low-level helpers (memory management)
• Using the assertions we fixed some undefined behavior. (Thanks to Thomas Waser)
• added new configure-debian-debug and configure-debian-log helper scripts
• The build server now checks if builds with active logger and debugging work correctly.
• Improved Coding Style in crypto_botan (thanks to Peter Nirschl)
• add external-links.txt to outputs (The file is generated in the build directory and contains all external-links. To validate them, use ./scripts/link-checker) (Thanks to Kurt Micheli)
• markdownlinkconverter handles directories correctly (using stat). (Thanks to Kurt Micheli)
• Fixed compiler warning caused by libxml2 (different behavior since 2.9.4), thanks to René Schwaiger
• added often used links in main README
• Improve documentation about failing test cases and what to do about it.
• added decisions about plugin_variants and array. (Thanks to Marvin Mall)
• Rename to metadata, metakey, mountpoint (Thanks to Peter Nirschl)
• std::ios_base::showbase can be used to output metadata when streaming keys (C++)
• New infos/status: readonly, writeonly, limited (Thanks to Marvin Mall)
• The tool update-infos-status orders infos/status and allows devs to easily add/rem entries. (Thanks to Kurt Micheli)
• Automatic setting of infos/status: nodoc, nodep, unittest, memleak, configurable (Thanks to Kurt Micheli)
• Improve create_lib_symlink, add PLUGIN argument and make it useful also for other library symlinks.
• New markdown style applied to most markdown files. (Thanks to Marvin Mall)
• Tracer is now disabled, even for ENABLE_DEBUG. (Thanks to Marvin Mall)
• Updated SECURITY document
• Macro naming convention ELEKTRA_, added kdbmacros.h
• ENABLE_DEBUG also works with clang and ENABLE_ASAN now allows devs to additionally enable sanitizers. Thanks to Gabriel Rauter.

Compatibility

As always, the ABI and API of kdb.h is fully compatible, i.e. programs compiled against an older 0.8 version of Elektra will continue to work (ABI) and you will be able to recompile programs without errors (API).

It is now possible to enquiry which plugins provide a specific format. This needed changes in libtools, which got a new major revision. Changes in the plugin’s contract are fully compatible: You can now use storage/ini instead of storage ini in infos/provides which gives you the information that ini is a storage format (and not anything else the plugin might provide). For compatibility reasons, the build system still adds storage ini even if only storage/ini is specified.

That means that kdb mount file.json /examples/json json still will find json plugins even if they are not called json but yajl.

Another breaking change in libtools is that appendNamespace was renamed to prependNamespace.

Error messages changed a bit, so if you tried to parse them, make sure to make the e of error case-insensitive ([eE]).

In the C++ binding, rewindMeta is now const and some methods to check if a key is in a namespace were added.

The intercept libraries were moved to a common folder. They can now be included or excluded like other BINDINGS. For consistency reasons the libraries were also renamed (libelektraintercept-fs.so and libelektraintercept-env.so.0), but symlinks allow you to link against their old names (lib/libelektraintercept.so and lib/libelektragetenv.so.0).

Package Maintainers

This information is intended for package maintainers.

• GI Bindings were removed from BINDINGS=ALL. It is recommended to use SWIG bindings instead, which will be added with ALL.
• Intercept libraries are part of BINDINGS. They will be added on glibc systems where BINDINGS=ALL is used.
• Documentation in textfiles is now installed, TARGET_DOCUMENTATION_TEXT_FOLDER was added for that purpose. The files are:
  • BIGPICTURE.md, GOALS.md, LICENSE.md, METADATA.ini, SECURITY.md, AUTHORS, CONTRACT.ini, NEWS.md, and WHY.md

Other new files are:

• Plugins: libelektra-base64.so, libelektra-c.so, libelektra-fcrypt.so libelektra-required.so, libelektra-simplespeclang.so (only in EXPERIMENTAL, not added by default, but with ALL)
• site_ruby/_kdb.so (ruby binding, only in ALL)
• testcpp_keyio, testkdb_error, testmod_base64, testmod_fcrypt (test binaries in TARGET_TOOL_EXEC_FOLDER)

Changed files are:

• libelektraintercept-env.so (renamed from libelektragetenv.so., but still available as symlink)
• libelektraintercept-fs.so (renamed from libelektraintercept.so, but still available as symlink)
• version upgrade: libelektratools.so.2

Portability

Elektra should work on every system that has cmake and a C/C++ compiler.

For this release we increased portability to better work with Mac OS X, CentOS 7, and OpenSuse 42.

• Mac OS X:
• Travis build server now also build qt-gui
• Support for xcode8 added (xcode6 still supported)
• fix lua != 5.2 issues (wrong output), update docu
• remove hard dependency to pkg-config
• remove hard dependency to version 3 of cmake (most parts still work with version 2)
• make search for swig 2 visible
• fix plugin names and mounting on OpenSuse 42.1

A big thanks to Kai-Uwe Behrmann, Mihael Pranjić and Sebastian Bachmann.

Fixed Issues

• simpleini: use correct error number when open file fails
• yajl: improve error message on non-utf8 text. (Thanks to Christoph Weber)
• drop multiple / from ~ paths (Thanks to Thomas Waser)
• fix failing testcases with ENABLE_DEBUG #988 (Thanks to Thomas Waser)
• csvstorage: files in source are rewritten #987 (Thanks to Thomas Waser)
• fix RTLD_NODELETE for OpenBSD (Thanks to Thomas Waser)
• better handle adding/deleting of read-only (info) plugins.
• fix behavior of multiple plugins setting errors (first error wins, later errors are transformed to warnings) (Thanks to Thomas Waser)
• fix resolver logic for missing files
• regex string in conditionals (Thanks to Thomas Waser)
• use KDB environment variable in shell tests and fix counting of tests for kdb run_all.
• output to stderr for elektrify-* scripts
• make desktop plugin mountable
• avoid cmake warnings in make uninstall (avoid @)
• fix quoting in ini plugin (Thanks to Thomas Waser)
• fix plugin names and mounting with plugin pre/postfixes (Thanks to Kai-Uwe Behrmann)
• mount-openicc: rename to openicc.json (Thanks to Kai-Uwe Behrmann)

Get It!

You can download the release from here and also here on github

• name: elektra-0.8.19.tar.gz
• size: 2681639
• md5sum: 6669e765c834e259fb7570f126b85d7e
• sha1: 82cefe4cea58d6e6b0a99ddbda24d1b57e98d93a
• sha256: cc14f09539aa95623e884f28e8be7bd67c37550d25e08288108a54fd294fd2a8

This release tarball now is also available signed by me using gpg

already built API-Docu can be found here

Stay tuned!

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For any questions and comments, please contact the Mailing List the issue tracker on github or by email elektra@markus-raab.org.

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For more information, see http://libelektra.org