News

Some user-visible changes are documented here. Version numbers have three components, major.minor.patch, with the following semantics:

we increment major for a release which contains particularly significant new features, enhancements and/or reworkings, whether or not upgrading to the release will require changes to user consfigs (though usually it will);
we increment minor for a release which does not satisfy the requirements for incrementing major, but where there are changes that could require changes in user consfigs, except very obscure such consfigs; and
we increment only patch for a release which includes no changes that we think could require changes in user consfigs.

Note that the notion of consfig-breaking changes is more than just strict API breaks, but also changes in behaviour which will likely require review by sysadmins using Consfigurator to maintain their systems.

In summary, you should always be able to upgrade to a release which only increments patch, but if either of the other two components have changed, you should review this document and see if your consfig needs updating.

1.4.4 (2024-10-10)

APT:UPDATED: Continue to try to execute apt-get update even if dpkg --configure --pending fails.
All APT properties: Pass -o DPkg::Lock::Timeout=60 to apt-get(8).

1.4.1 (2024-07-10)

DISK::CREATE-VOLUME for DISK:PARTITIONED-VOLUME now executes sgdisk --clear before sgdisk --zap-all to avoid certain failures to clear out the block device.
Add OS types for FreeBSD.
Add some properties for FreeBSD’s pkg(8) and rc.conf(5).
:SBCL Lisp-type connections can now be established to FreeBSD hosts.

1.4.0 (2024-05-09)

APACHE:HTTPS-VHOST now adds an Apache <Directory> directive which ensures that HTTP access to the .well-known/acme-challenge/ subdirectory of the document root is granted.
APT:STANDARD-SOURCES-FOR will not try to add *-backports sources for stable releases whose *-backports dists are gone from the official Debian mirrors.

1.3.2 (2024-04-24)

Add LIBVIRT:KVM-BOOTS-LVM-LV and LIBVIRT:KVM-BOOTS-LVM-LV-FOR.
Pass --batch and --no-tty to gpg(1) to avoid some tty issues. Thanks to David Bremner.
Fix a bug in DISK:HOST-LOGICAL-VOLUMES-EXIST that meant it would try to add /etc/fstab entries for each logical volume it created rather than for each filesystem it tries to mount.
FILE:HOST-DATA-UPLOADED and FILE:HOST-SECRET-UPLOADED can now upload multiple files.

1.3.1 (2023-06-12)

Add REAPPLIED and PERIODIC:REAPPLIED-AT-MOST property combinators.

1.3.0 (2023-03-17)

Readtable:
- New reader macros #~m// and #~s/// for shell- and Perl-style regular expression matching and replacement.
- New reader macro #>>EOF>> which is like #>EOF> except that it skips over the remainder of the current line and its newline. This is more like how heredocs work in other languages.
- Support for indented heredocs, where the indentation of the lines of the heredoc is stripped. This mode is activated by prepending a tilde to the heredoc terminator. For example:
```
(foo "argument 1" #>>~EOF>>
     My line 1.
     My line 2.
     EOF)
```
  The function receives "My line 1.\nMy line 2."
  
  This is a minor breaking change because heredoc terminators may no longer begin with a tilde.
Documentation:
- New manual section “Reader macros” discussing Consfigurator’s named readtable, including some usage reservations for the sake of future extension.
- New tutorial, “Defining new properties”.
- Extract docstrings and use them to generate API references in the manual. It should now be possible to know what properties are available for your use without having to read the source of properties modules.
Miscellaneous:
- New Emacs major mode, consfigurator-lisp-mode. This takes care of informing Emacs that parts of the buffer are CL-INTERPOL, CL-HEREDOC and our #~m// and #~s/// strings, fixing SLIME’s C-c C-c in certain cases.

1.2.2 (2023-02-20)

APT properties: add non-free-firmware section to generated sources lists. On Debian bullseye and older this will cause apt updates to emit harmless warnings.
LXC:USER-CONTAINER and LXC:USER-CONTAINER-FOR are now unapplicable.
Add LXC:USER-CONTAINER-STOPPED and FILE:EMPTY-DIRECTORY-DOES-NOT-EXIST.

1.2.0 (2022-11-29)

APT properties now cache what packages have been explicitly installed and removed this deployment. This should significantly speed up many deployments. User properties which install or remove packages by calling apt-get(8) or dpkg(1) directly might inadvertedly render the lists of properties installed and removed invalid. Such properties should be changed to call or apply the new APT:KNOWN-INSTALLED-REMOVED-PACKAGES-RESET property to invalidate the cache.
Fix a bug in FILE:SYMLINKED that meant that with at least GNU ln(1), the property would fail to overwrite existing symbolic links in some cases.
Fix a bug in FILE:DOES-NOT-EXIST which meant that it did nothing if only some of the files that should not exist needed to be deleted.
When recovering from a failed debootstrap, instead of just recursively deleting the target directory, we now call EMPTY-REMOTE-DIRECTORY, to empty it, instead. This is better when the target directory is a mount point.

1.1.1 (2022-09-18)

Add FILE:CONTAINS-CONF-UNSPACED.
PROPAPPLY now signals an error if asked to apply a property that has neither :APPLY nor :HOSTATTRS subroutines. This is primarily intended to catch cases where the property is defined in a .lisp file that you haven’t yet added to your consfig’s .asd file.
APT:PROXY is now unapplicable.
APT:INSTALLED, APT:INSTALLED-MINIMALLY and APT:REMOVED now always execute apt-get(8). Previously they tried to determine whether the packages were already installed or removed by parsing output from apt-cache(8), but the implementation sometimes gave the wrong answer.

1.1.0 (2022-08-02)

API change: DISK:HOST-VOLUMES-CREATED has been removed in favour of new properties DISK:FIRST-DISK-INSTALLED-FOR and DISK:VOLUMES-INSTALLED-FOR.
API change: INSTALLED:CHROOT-INSTALLED-TO-VOLUMES-FOR has been renamed to INSTALLER:FILES-INSTALLED-TO-VOLUMES-FOR, and will now bootstrap a root filesystem directly to the volumes if not supplied a chroot. The CHROOT parameter has become a keyword parameter, and the required parameters have changed from (HOST CHROOT VOLUMES) to (OPTIONS HOST VOLUMES) for consistency with other property lambda lists.

The new property also includes a bugfix: we now rebuild the initramfs after populating the crypttab.
API change: DISK:WITH-OPENED-VOLUMES now includes volumes that were already open, and their parents, in the connattrs.
DISK:LUKS-CONTAINER: Add support for passing arbitrary options to cryptsetup(8) when creating volumes, such as --cipher.
DISK:WITH-OPENED-VOLUMES, INSTALLER:FILES-INSTALLED-TO-VOLUMES-FOR and DISK:VOLUMES-INSTALLED-FOR support a new LEAVE-OPEN argument to request that opened volumes are not closed. This is useful for inspecting the result of an installation, but must be used with caution: the next deployment will assume the volumes have been manually closed.

1.0.3 (2022-06-29)

Wrap calls to OSICAT:USER-INFO with a fallback to use getent(1). This fixes cases where getpwnam(3) and getpwuid(3) can fail to load required NSS modules because we have chrooted or similar.
Consfigurator now converts some of its internal shell script snippets to single lines before executing them, which improves debug output and the readability of process names visible to remote commands like ps(1).
Add PROG-CHANGES, USER:GROUP-EXISTS and INSTALLER:WITH-CLEANLY-INSTALLED-ONCE.
ESEQPROPS-UNTIL can now be used with any condition class, not just those subtyping FAILED-CHANGE.
REBOOT:AT-END now falls back to shell sleep-based scheduling when shutdown(8) cannot schedule a reboot for the future.
Fix a few bugs in FILE:CONTAINS-INI-SETTINGS.
Fix FSTAB:HAS-ENTRIES-FOR-OPENED-VOLUMES for FAT32 filesystems.

1.0.1 (2022-05-11)

Some enhancements to OS combinators.
New data source to fetch passphrases from a pass(1) data store, thanks to David Bremner.