After years of extensive dwarven research, scientists have concluded that no, pig iron is not related to pigs in any way, and is therefore impossible to craft into ☼steel bacon☼.

It’s still not orgs and whatnot, but after a long simmering process goiardi 0.11.0 - Steel Bacon is now available. The fixes in this release were important enough to release before 1.0.0 is ready.

From the CHANGELOG:

* Ability to upload cookbooks to S3.
* Add script to upload local files to S3 to migrate.
* Change how items are indexed with the postgres indexer, to reduce the number of rows in the search_items table substantially (at the cost of possible differences in search results in a few weird corner cases).
* Search parser no longer chokes on Unicode. Unfortunately Postgres' ltree module does not accept all Unicode alphanumeric characters as valid still.
* Use vendoring.
* Rejigger the package building process a bit - changing how the different packages are built and how version numbers are determined.
* Fix a long-standing annoyance where the log file would get truncated when goiardi started or restarted.
* Allow passing environment variables to goiardi through the config file.
* Fix in-memory indexer to work with go 1.7.
* Add packages for CentOS 6 and 7. Also use a gox fork pulling in someone's PR with better ARM support until that gets merged upstream eventually.
* Change the postgres columns using the 'json' data type to use 'jsonb' instead. This is generally better, but does mean that goiardi now requires PostgreSQL 9.4 or later.

Packages are available at https://packagecloud.io/ct/goiardi, and individual binaries for a variety of architectures can be found on the release page.

The most important parts of this release are being able to upload files to AWS S3 (or compatible services), which you can read more about in the s3 docs, and the improvements with the Postgres search. These search changes reduce the number of rows in the search table by roughly half, at the expense of slightly more complex SQL queries behind the scenes. Upgrades to 0.11.0 from earlier versions of goiardi using the Postgres search will need to reindex the search tables by running knife index rebuild -y.

In any circumstance, earlier versions of goiardi using a version of Postgres older than 9.4 will need to upgrade postgres before updating goiardi and applying the sqitch patches.

This release also brings goiardi binaries for Linux on s390x (a.k.a z/Arch) (because go 1.7 will compile binaries for s390x now). Said binaries appear to work, so the next minor version of goiardi will include Debian and RHEL based packages for that architecture. This way, goiardi will obviously be Ready For The Enterprise™. Binaries for VMS will have to wait until such time as goiardi builds again with gccgo, sadly.

“Taihun” was the Gothic word for “ten”. For whatever reason all of the surviving Germanic languages have lost that ‘h’ sound in the middle of the word “ten”, but Gothic preserved it. You can also see some of the usual Germanic sound changes in that word, where a ’d’ sound became a ’t’, and at least some ‘k’ sounds became an ‘h’ sound. Compare Latin decem (bear in mind that the ‘c’ there had a ‘k’ sound originally). You see that sound change as well with “hundred” (compare Latin centum (same thing with the ‘c’)). It also shows a lack of satemization - compare the Russian де́сять (desyat’).

I am pleased to present goiardi version 0.10.0 - Taihun. This release brings the long discussed PostgreSQL based search, along with a search bug fix and some behind-the-scenes changes that won’t impact anyone directly.

From the CHANGELOG:

* Search architecture changed so different search backends can be used (thanks
  oker1 for your work on that).
* Postgres search is here at last! If you're using Postgres, instead of using
  the ersatz solr search, you can instead use Postgres to power your searches.
* Add a mutex for the original goiardi search - multiple simple queries
  executing simultaneously are not a problem, but multiple complex queries can 
  eat up all the RAM on the machine and cause goiardi to crash. This mitigates
  that situation.
* Be a little more forgiving with reporting protocol versions - allow
  specifying the protocol version as a query param instead of only as a
  header. This is to make showing reports with the webui a little easier.
* Bump the Chef Server version we claim to be from 11.1.6 to 11.1.7.

The Postgres search has come a long way since it went into preview. Performance with 10,000 fauxhai generated nodes is a lot more reasonable now, and it appears to be stable and behaving well. If it isn’t, of course, I’d like to hear about it. There is more detailed documentation about the new postgres search available, if you’re interested. The postgres search preview post also has useful information that’s still relevant, if you haven’t seen it yet.

For the future, once 1.0.0 is finished, I also want to make a standalone version of this search à la universe that could work with Chef Server. This would require some changes in erchef to populate the tables, though.

As mentioned in the release notes:

No matter what, whether you’re using the new postgres search or not, if you’re upgrading to this release you’ll need to rebuild your search index. If you’re using the old search, delete your index file first. Then, whether you’re using the old trie index or the new postgres based search, run knife index rebuild -y.

At last, the little issues that kept presenting themselves should all be dealt with. Development on 1.0.0, bringing orgs+RBAC to goiardi, can restart and hopefully be finished sooner rather than later.