16 May 2017, 06:55

goiardi version 0.11.4 - Fahrenheit Forever

The most just and noble of all temperature scales, only approached in excellence by the quiet majesty of Rankine.

The new goiardi 0.11.4 - Fahrenheit Forever considers 23º to be absolutely freezing, and 70º to be a nice warm day.

Another release that doesn’t change a whole lot that’s very obvious to the end user, but is mostly aimed at the future. The only change likely to matter a great deal to most people is the fact that goiardi now supports Chef auth v1.3, in addition to 1.0, 1.1, and 1.2 (which never really got off the ground for whatever reason). The thing with HEAD requests could be very handy, once there’s client support; the way goiardi implements it, the HEAD request makes much lighter database queries than the GET does, so doing things like checking for the existence of a particular node could be done without consuming as many resources.

One more item of note: since goiardi is using contexts now, it does require golang 1.7 or greater. As noted in the CHANGELOG, goiardi already technically only supported 1.7+, but it would probably build with older versions. Now, that condition is explicit.

Packages are in the usual places, and 0.11.4 is already in sid.

From the CHANGELOG:

* Implement Chef authentication version 1.3.
* Move the custom goiardi error type out of util and into its own module.
  Wrappers around the new module are in util still for convenience, and
  because the functions and interface are used all over the place.
* Many endpoints now handle HEAD requests where appropriate. With some
  endpoints this is not especially useful, but with others it's a lightweight
  way to see what resources exist and so forth. Implements Chef RFC 090.
* Start using contexts with requests. This does mean that goiardi will require
  at least go 1.7. (As of 0.11.3 goiardi only supported go 1.7+, but it was
  likely to build with somewhat older versions anyway.)
* Minor bugfixes - deal with a possible race condition with the in-mem search
  index, change some logging statements from Info to Debug that didn't need to
  be Info level and removed a test log statement that was no longer necessary,
  updated copyright dates.
* Add the Chef API version header to responses.
* Change behavior if the data file and use-(mysql|postgresql) are specified
  together; formerly it was a fatal error, but now it'll just emit a warning
  in the error log and ignore the data file setting.

24 Mar 2017, 14:25

goiardi version 0.11.3 - Menaces with Spikes
This is a goiardi 0.11.3 release. All programmerdwarfship is of, um, some sort of quality. It is encircled with bands of cruft. It is made from raw golang source files. This object menaces with spikes of yak hair. On the item is an image of a goiardi 0.11.3 release. On the item is an image of a programmer in sphalerite. The programmer is making a plaintive gesture.

The goiardi 0.11.3 - Menaces with Spikes has come! A housekeeping and bugfix release, mostly. It has command line options. Beware its documentation!

There are bugfixes in this release, one of which is fairly important. If an object being indexed for search had arrays with duplicate items, the in-memory trie index would crash goiardi when trying to index it. (This not only didn’t come up hardly ever, but it was really hard to track down the actual source of the crash.)

There’s new command line flags, so you can configure MySQL and PostgreSQL connections without having to use the config file. Another new development which might be interesting is that now you can configure many of those command line flags with environment variables. This makes running goiardi in Docker easier, since you can just pass in values that way rather than having to mount your own config file to the image, built a new image of your own from scratch, or such and such.

The optional index value length trimming that’s new with this release should be able to save some memory, if your roles, nodes, environments, or data bags have lots of very long values in them. Right now it’s disabled by default, but in the next major (or minor - basically whatever ends up not being 0.11.x; the question is if that will be 0.12.0 or 1.0.0) release the trimming will be on by default. Testing has shown that trimming those indexed values to 100 characters works well, but 50 characters is too short. At 50 characters, some chef-pedant search tests were breaking.

Aside from all that, most of the rest is documentation housekeeping and small changes to packaging. As always, binaries for a variety of platforms are available on the release page, and packages for Debian wheezy, jessie, and stretch, Ubuntu trusty, xenial, and yakkety, and CentOS 6 & 7 are available for various combinations of amd64, arm, and s390x architectures at the goiardi packagecloud.io repo.

From the CHANGELOG:

* Add an option to trim values in search indexes. Currently not enabled by
  default, but will be in the next minor goiardi release (so, either 0.12.0 or
  1.0.0, depending on which ends up being next). Existing indexes ought to be
  reindexed upon upgrading, but they should still work if this is skipped.
* Fix a bug where duplicated items in slices in objects being indexed with the
  in-memory trie based index would cause goiardi to crash. For good measure,
  even though it isn't necessary to prevent a crash remove those same
  duplicate items from objects being indexed with the postgres index.
* Mark --use-unsafe-mem-store as deprecated. In the unlikely event someone's
  using that option, a warning will print in the log. This option may be
  removed at any time.
* Allow setting configuration options via environment variables. (See
  the documentation for the details.)
* Finally allow configuring MySQL or PostgreSQL connection options with
  command line flags (or, now, environment variables).
* Fixed format issues and wording in a few places in the documentation, along
  with updating the docs for the current version.
* Add a hidden flag to generate a simple man page.
* Add that simple man page, along with the html docs, to the packagecloud.io
  packages.
* Add a Dockerfile to allow running the local goiardi source in docker.
* Add Debian "stretch" and Ubuntu "yakkety yak" to the distro versions we have
  in the package repository.