0.8.20 Release

What is Elektra?

Elektra serves as a universal and secure framework to access configuration settings in a global, hierarchical key database. For more information, visit https://libelektra.org.

Highlights

This is by far the largest release in Elektra's history. In 2813 commits, 19 authors changed 1714 files with 92462 insertions(+) and 21532 deletions(-). The highlights are:

libelektra.org

Unfortunately this release was delayed. The reason for the delay is that our community server (build server, web site,...) was compromised and we needed to reinstall everything from scratch.

We took advantage of the situation, and reinstalled everything properly managed by puppet-libelektra. With puppet-libelektra, you can directly set keys, specifications (validations), and even mount new configuration files from within Puppet.

Our community server is now completely managed by libelektra.

Thanks to Bernhard Denner, for rescuing us from the difficult situation, especially for the sprint shortly before the release.

As already already announced in December 2016 we completely reimplemented our website. Now all our websites are available via https. This release is the first one that includes the source code of the website and its snippet sharing functionality.

The backend for this snippet sharing website uses Elektra itself: both for its configuration and for the configuration snippets.

Thanks again to Marvin Mall for the awesome website.

Haskell and Ruby

The Ruby binding, created by Bernhard Denner, was greatly improved and now includes libtools bindings. It is the first binding that goes beyond Elektra's main API. Bernhard Denner also added many examples that demonstrate how you can take advantage of the Ruby bindings.

Armin Wurzinger created a new binding for the functional language Haskell. He also added support for Haskell plugins. Due to generic CMake and C Code, plugins can be written exclusively in Haskell, without any glue code. Several Haskell examples already exist. The Haskell support is currently experimental.

Shell Completion

René Schwaiger added completion support for Fish in this release. We also extended our support for other shells: The new tool kdb complete suggests how to complete an Elektra path. It considers mountpoints and also takes bookmarks into account. Thanks to Armin Wurzinger for creating this useful utility. Our Zsh and fish completions already take advantage of kdb complete. Thanks to Sebastian Bachmann for taking the time to update the zsh completions.

New Plugins

See plugin overview to get an overview of the ever-growing number of plugins.

The yamlcpp plugin and camel plugin add first support for YAML.

The mini plugin is yet another minimal INI plugin.

Thanks to René Schwaiger.

The date plugin supports validation of dates according to three standards:

The multifile plugin allows us to integrate many configuration files via globbing with a single mount command. It supports .d configuration directories as often used today.

The file plugin interprets the content of a file as configuration value.

The ipaddr plugin adds support for IP address validation on systems that do not support getaddrinfo.

Thanks to Thomas Waser for creating these useful plugins.

The xerces plugin supplants the xmltool plugin and allows us to use XML files not following a specific schemata. Attributes are mapped to Elektra's metadata, multiple keys with the same names are mapped to arrays.

Thanks to Armin Wurzinger.

Documentation

The documentation was greatly improved within this release.

Features

We added even more functionality, which could not make it to the highlights:

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).

We added explicit to some C++ constructors in libtools and internally moved some typedefs. ModulesPluginDatabase now has protected members (instead of private). This might break code in special cases, but should not affect binary compatibility. As always we tested for binary compatibility. This time we had to revert some changes to keep libelektra-tools ABI compatible.

Furthermore:

Notes for Package Maintainer

These notes are of interest for people maintaining packages of Elektra:

The following files are new:

The following files were removed: testmod_curlget, testmod_dpkg, testmod_profile, testmod_shell, testmod_spec, test_opmphm_vheap, test_opmphm_vstack

The following files were renamed: libelektra-1.jar → libelektra4j-0.8.19.jar

In the Debian branch of the git repo, we now build upon the work of Pino Toscano. The branch allows building Debian packages of the release for Debian Stretch and Jessie.

Thanks to Pino Toscano for the high-quality packages.

Notes for Elektra's Developers

These notes are of interest for people developing Elektra:

Other

Various other changes happened in the code repository:

Quality

In this release we had a focus on quality improvements:

Fixes

Many problems were resolved with the following fixes:

Outlook

We are currently working on following topics:

Get It!

You can download the release from here or GitHub

The hashsums are:

The release tarball is also available signed by me using gpg from here or GitHub

Already built API documentation can be found online or GitHub.

Stay tuned!

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For any questions and comments, please contact the issue tracker on GitHub or me by email using elektra@markus-raab.org.

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

Best regards, Markus