About to publish project-builder.org 0.12.1

When I looked at the date of the current project-builder.org current stable version, I had a shock ! It has been nearly a year since I published that version. I should not stay that long without providing updates 😦 But you know what it is, you always think that you should still add that latest cool feature, and then that other, + fix this problem, … and you end up one year later with a great development version, but still no public stable one so others could benefit from your work.

So it’s time ! Especially as I have committed a lot of patches from an HP colleague, Eric Anderson, who is using the tool (and in its devel version !) to support packaging projects he is working on for HP. So I worked hard since the 8th of May to integrate what he has made available on github, since he got HP’s approval through the OSRB. And I have integrated I think more than 90% of his enhancements, which now will make 0.12.1 even more appealing than before.

But I’m not as a good guy as some think 😉 Some of the patches seemed strange to me, or could have an impact which I wasn’t completely sure of, so there is still some work Eric did, that has been left appart for the moment. Sorry for that, but I’m a slow guy, using this project on a daily basis, so I really need to be convinced before accepting a patch. But I was convinced by a lot 😉 I’ll now contact him back through the project mailing list, and see how we can work on these remaining points for 0.12.2 so he has a tool working much better for him. Among the nice stuff Eric has brought is clearly a much improved GIT support (read working !), and Debian/Ubuntu support as well (as he is using them natively). He also added support for stopping with the first error, or not as this is an option. Plus lots of improvements all around.

And he will also beneft from my own modifications, which hopefully improved the tool as well ! The last one, being with the configuration file management, now fully done in memory, instead of re-reading all conf file each time (which could also have some advantages, but speed improvement is what I was looking for here). In particular, in this version, the documentation has been improved a lot and should help more beginners. I have added a new getconf option to help following the value of configuration items (useful as pb uses lots of config files !), checkssh to verify what has been delivered on the repository, wrt what should have been, cleanssh to clean up the remote repository for test versions. A new -t option has been added to create local packages more quickly (when only the local distro will be used). Patches support has also been extended to .deb distributions. I have also introduced a new script, pbmkbm, which is aimed at creating customized boot media (project-builder.org make boot media), that will be the basis of an evolution of mindi in the MondoRescue project (doesn’t work as of now, and more on that later on). Some enhancement requests and bug fixes have also been done (#99, #585, #93, #522, #103, #105, new distro support for Fedora 15 and 16, Ubuntu 11.10, 12.04, OpenSuSE 11.4, 12.1 at least). #101 is the last on the list for 0.12.1 and as soon as it’s mostly done, I’ll publish it. Promised !

Stay tuned as usual 😉

Tags: HP, Linux, Open Source, packaging, perl, project-builder.org