Baserock/ releases/ Baserock 11 Release Notes

Using Baserock

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Background

Date: 2013-09-04

Baserock 11 is released

The Baserock team and Codethink Limited are proud to announce the release of version 11 of the Baserock system.

What's new in this version?

Refactoring branch and merge

Refactoring of branch and merge is still ongoing, but the following subcommands have been refactored:

  • edit
  • foreach
  • status
  • petrify
  • branch-from-image

The following subcommands will be refactored in the next release:

  • merge
  • build

Protected host in build-essential

When building chunks in build-essential, the host filesystem is now marked read-only to prevent badly-behaved chunks causing unwanted changes.

This resulted in build-essential changes. You must upgrade your systems to use the newer build-essential, or building with the latest release of morph will fail.

Minor changes to morph

  • The formatting of the output of morph help has been modified to preserve indentation.
  • morph cross-bootstrap has been through various minor fixes.

Changes to morphs

Reordering

For the sake of code simplicity, when morph edits systems and strata it no longer preserves the ordering of fields, and instead writes them back in alphabetical order. To minimise surprise and unreadable diffs, all of the systems and strata have been converted to alphabetical order.

Changed chunks

As part of protecting the host in build-essential, changes were made to these chunks:

  • binutils
  • busybox
  • eglibc
  • gawk
  • gcc
  • make

You must upgrade your systems to use the newer build-essential, or building with the latest release of morph will fail.

Other changes include:

  • Upgraded bc to fix some bugs
  • Upgraded to a newer version of OpenSSL
  • busybox has been changed to make NTP run continuously.
  • Upgraded git to version 1.8.4
  • glib has been upgraded to version 2.38.0
  • python-setuptools and pyyaml have been moved into the 'core' stratum

New systems and Strata

We have a new Xfce-system which adds a basic desktop environment to Baserock. To give it a try, build and boot an Xfce-system, and run startxfce4.

We are currently working on making Baserock able to deploy to OpenStack. This includes the openstack-client base systems, the glanceclient stratum and the cloudinit-support stratum.

A cross-bootstrap system exists for x86_64. This is a minimal system that contains everything needed to build a Baserock system, though not necessarily deploy it.

None of these new systems are considered ready for production use, but feel free to give them a try!

How do I get started?

You can find a quick start guide on the Baserock wiki and also a short guide on developing with Baserock which follows on from the quick start guide and shows you how to get to the point of proving you can build Baserock within Baserock.

From that point on, your imagination is the limit. You can follow our development in the Git repositories we publish.

How do I get in contact?

The Baserock project has an IRC channel and mailing list for developers to gather and discuss anything associated with Baserock. It is strongly recommended that you use the IRC and lists to contact the team for anything associated with the public development of Baserock. We also have a mailing list for announcements which will be notified of any new releases or big developments in Baserock.

If you manage to find a bug in Baserock, we'd like to hear from you. You can find our bug reporting guidelines on the Baserock wiki and we will do our best to help.

We hope you enjoy experimenting with Baserock and look forward to hearing about any cool things you do with our work.