4.1.0-0
Released 11th January 2021
Stable Release Candidate 11 - Otherwise known as our first v4 Stable!!!
GitHub has now changed our count of releases! So we are again at release 84 !!
But given we are on the eve of HAL9000’s 25th birthday, lets adopt that as our reference here.
So this one has been a long time in development. Mainly as it’s been a tricky time for the core developers involved but we are here now. And this time has give us the opportunity to weed out the last of the fixes deemed necessary before our first v4 stable release. v4.0.9-0 just wasn’t quite there unfortunately.
Thanks
As always and as an ongoing sentiment, I’d like to thank all update channel subscribers, folks here on the forum, on GitHub, and via support email, for making this a possibility. Feedback on where we are, from your perspective, is critical, and forms our main motivation on what to concentrate on. So as always, pick you flavour (update channel) and report away.
Special thanks to @Flox from myself. Our venerable core/docs/rock-ons/installer dev & forum admin has, as usual, pulled it out of the hat yet again. Despite having a greater work load elsewhere than normal.
New testing channel phase imminent
As stated in our last release we now need to move forward with our next testing channel phase. This is super important and can’t be put off any longer. We need Python 3 compatibility moving forward and that is a non trivial move. So do not continue with the testing channel if you intend to use, rather than develop Rockstor. It will be broken from a user perspective while we update the entirety of our code, starting with all the Django stuff. However: this exact same rpm (v4.1.0-0), baring any disasters, will be copied over to the stable channel shortly. And I intend to modify our installer to include this first v4 stable version out-of-the-box.
To the changes since v4.0.9-0
Changelog summary:
- Remove neglected/redundant AUTHORS file #2328 @phillxnet
- Reject null serial disk entries from database #2344 @phillxnet
- Centralise device serial rejection system #2330 @phillxnet
- Sender issues re notification emails #2339 @phillxnet
- Postfix hash format is deprecated in Leap 15.3 #2324 @phillxnet @FroggyFlox
- Mock ifp_get_groupname() instead of grp.getgrid() #2327 @FroggyFlox
- Refactor restore_service() logic to assume the service is OFF #2334 @FroggyFlox
- initrock via rockstor-pre fails on non-existent /etc/issue #2335 @phillxnet
- NUT timed shutdown has file path bug #2331 @phillxnet
- Remove special treatment for the deprecated discourse rock-on #2033 @phillxnet
- Remove coverage library as unused and now requires Python 3 #2325 @phillxnet @FroggyFlox
Most noteworthy here are the venerable @Flox’s config save import fix. @Hooverdan was again invaluable here with some impressively detailed and dogged reporting. Super important for our first v4 stable given the folks migrating over from v3 only once v4 stable was available. Other fixes are to critical bugs in email, NUT (UPS) function, Leap 15.2 → 15.3 dup updates, an improvement and likely speedup of disk serial rejection and some deprecation issues.
Since our last release we have also now re-done our Website in Hugo and have re-vamped and freshly populated our downloads page; full of pre-build installers. Be sure to also report on any typos etc with this central resource and remember it too is open-source via the following GitHub repo:
With all text now editable in mark-down curtousy of our move to Hugo. We also plan, over time, to add multi-lingual capability there.
Test away and report rapidly as we work against the forces of kipple. And please check your Stable subscriptions if you have any (https://appman.rockstor.com/ ) 
Hot fixes of critical failures will follow in the Stable channel while we tackle the technical debt in the new testing channel.
Rockstor’s continued development and associated build and release infrastructure is dependant on multiple support vectors; and given this release we hope to re-enable our Commercial Support option shortly.