We are proud to release Elektra 0.9.4.
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.
You can also read the news on our website
warnings metadata array has been changed. see below (Klemens Böswirth)ini plugin (superseded by the TOML plugin), the null plugin (superseded by the base64 plugin) and the tcl plugin (Markus Raab, Philipp Gackstatter)There have been significant changes to Elektra's key names:
The most important change is that you now need a : after the namespace.
So instead of system/elektra/version you have to use system:/elektra/version.
The second big change is to array elements.
From now on keyNew ("/array/#10", KEY_END) will create a Key with name /array/#_10, to make arrays more user-friendly by preserving numerical ordering.
The whole implementation for keySetName, keyAddName, etc. has been completely rewritten.
If you rely on specific behavior of Elektra's key names and have already taken the two changes above into account, please refer to the newly created key name documentation and Python reference implementation.
Metakeys now use the namespace meta:/.
The accessor functions keyGetMeta and keySetMeta automatically add this namespace to preserve compatibility.
However, if you use the recently introduced keyMeta or otherwise directly access the key name of a metakey, you will have to update your code.
default:/ is a new namespace used for keys that exist purely to represent a default value (e.g. generated by the spec plugin).
Looking up cascading keys with ksLookup now looks at namespaces in the following order:
proc:/dir:/user:/system:/default:// (cascading key itself)The final lookup of the cascading key itself, will be removed in a future release.
Please update your code to generate default:/ keys, if you rely on this feature.
Note: The spec plugin already generates default:/ keys.
The function keyInactive has been removed.
The concept of inactive keys no longer exists, use comment/# instead.
ElektraNamespace is the new C++ enum class for the Elektra's namespaces.
You should prefer it to using KEY_NS_SYSTEM et al. directly, if you use C++.
keyGetFullName et al. have been removed. The concept of a "full name (with owner)" no longer exists.
A huge thanks to (Klemens Böswirth) for doing these important changes and clean-ups.
The change to key names breaks existing mountpoint configurations.
It is not hard to fix the mountpoint configs even after the updating to the new version.
There are two places that will still contain the old syntax after the update:
system:/elektra/mountpoints/<MOUNTPOINT> uses an old key names as <MOUNTPOINT>, if the mountpoint was created with kdb mount.system:/elektra/mountpoints/*/mountpoint must be valid key names.Fixing the first instance is optional. There the key name is just used to create a unique name for the mountpoint.
The second instance, however, must be fixed or Elektra will be unusable.
Disclaimer: We cannot guarantee that the commands below work for all cases. We also make no guarantees that the command will not break things.
Please report any problems.
You have been warned. Manually backup important data first.
For the migration you can use the following commands:
#! /usr/bin/env sh
kdb export system:/elektra/mountpoints ni > mountpoints.ini
sed -E 's~((^\[?|/mountpoint = )(user|system))((\\\\)?/)~\1:\4~g' mountpoints.ini > mountpoints_corrected.ini
kdb mv -r system:/elektra/mountpoints system:/elektra/mountpoints-backup
kdb import system:/elektra/mountpoints ni < mountpoints_corrected.ini
Note: The original
system:/elektra/mountpointsdata will be moved tosystem:/elektra/mountpoints-backup
We are now using CPack to generate modular Debian, Ubuntu (DEB) and Fedora (RPM) packages. This simplifies the packaging process and solves problems where a PR, which introduces changes to installed files, fails. We can now also set distribution specific dependencies with CPack, which is needed for some packages. (Robert Sowula)
We now provide DEB and RPM packages for releases and for every commit on master in our own repositories using CPack for:
A big thanks to (Robert Sowula) for introducing CPack and creating the repositories.
sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keys.gnupg.net --recv-keys F26BBE02F3C315A19BF1F791A9A25CC1CC83E839
deb https://debs.libelektra.org/<DISTRIBUTION> <DISTRIBUTION> main into /etc/apt/sources.list
where <DISTRIBUTION> is the codename of your distributions e.g. focal, bionic or buster.apt-get install libelektra5-all
Download our .repo configuration file and add it to yum/dnf.
To get all packaged plugins, bindings and tools install:
dnf install libelektra5-all
For more available packages, further instructions on how to add our repositories or instructions on how to use our master built packages, please refer to our install documentation.
The 0.9.* series of Elektra is for development of Elektra 1.0. Elektra 1.0 will be incompatible to 0.8 and as such, we need a SO version bump. We used this release to bump the SO version from 4 to 5 due to the breaking changes that are not visible in the API.
Note: that within 0.9.* we likely introduce further breaking changes but we will not bump the SO version again.
The package names which consist of the SO Version also changed from libelektra4* to libelektra5*. If you used our previous repository with master built packages, please make sure to migrate to our new package repositories described above or in our install documentation.
The version of the Java bindings was also bumped from 4 to 5, although the API is also work in progress.
A big thanks to (Robert Sowula) for doing the necessary renamings.
The following section lists news about the plugins we updated in this release.
jni plugin is closed. (Mihael Pranjić)provides clause in the plugin contract. Now mINI offers support for the properties format (storage/properties) instead of the INI file format (storage/ini). This makes sense, since the plugin never supported the section syntax of INI files. (René Schwaiger)4.9. (René Schwaiger)The text below summarizes updates to the C (and C++)-based libraries of Elektra.
KDB_DB_FILE (default.ecf) for system:/elektra, if the bootstrap backend KDB_DB_INIT (elektra.ecf) isn't found).
If you still rely on this feature, either use kdb upgrade-bootstrap before upgrading, or manually extract system:/elektra into elektra.ecf.warnings metadata now forms a proper array.
Specifically, the first 100 warnings are stored below to the meta keys warnings/#0, warnings/#1, ..., warnings/#9, warnings/#_10, ..., warnings/#_99.
After that, warnings will wrap around, so the 101st warning will be stored as warnings/#0, 102nd as warnings/#1 etc.kdbSet now properly handles, if the given parentKey is NULL or has read-only name, value or metadata. (Klemens Böswirth)elektraKeyGetMetaKeySet and moved keySetStringF to the hosts plugin. (Philipp Gackstatter)ksPopAtCursor. (Philipp Gackstatter)Bindings allow you to utilize Elektra using various programming languages. This section keeps you up-to-date with the multi-language support provided by Elektra.
__ipairs was deprecated. (Manuel Mausz)ElektraNamespace is the new C++ enum class for the Elektra's namespaces. You should prefer it to using KEY_NS_SYSTEM et al. directly, if you use C++.
The array ELEKTRA_NAMESPACES can be used to iterate over all namespaces. (Klemens Böswirth)__declspec attributes for Ruby 3.0. (Mihael Pranjić)user or user: as user:/ is now required. (Markus Raab)generate-random-string in check-env-dep.
(René Schwaiger)kdb <testname>.
Existing tests have been update to support this. (Klemens Böswirth)RTLD_NODELETE on dlopen() when the ENABLE_ASAN CMake option is used. This enables ASAN to find symbols which otherwise might be unloaded. (Mihael Pranjić)The website is generated from the repository, so all information about plugins, bindings and tools are always up-to-date.
We are currently working on following topics:
We closed 21 issues for this release.
About 13 authors changed 1280 files with 26471 insertions(+) and 29959 deletions(-) in 428 commits.
Thanks to all authors for making this release possible!
We welcome new contributors! Read here about how to get started.
As first step, you could give us feedback about these release notes. Contact us via our issue tracker.
You can download the release from here or GitHub
The hashsums are:
The release tarball is also available signed using GnuPG from here or on GitHub
The following GPG Key was used to sign this release: 12CC44541E1B8AD9B66AFAD55262E7353324914A
Already built API documentation can be found here or on GitHub.
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For more information, see https://libelektra.org
Best regards, Elektra Initiative