V4.5+ Testing Channel Changelog

Announcements
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v4.5.0-0

Released in Testing Channel updates on 9th November 2022.

Our first v4.5 Testing Channel release.

We are, in this release, starting out a little differently than our prior releases. This new approach was covered in our last stable channel announcement here:

this is said aforementioned thread.

Thanks

As per our usual practice, I’d like to thank all those ‘out here’ and behind the scenes that have made this somewhat significant release possible. Most specifically our very own venerable @Flox. A ‘co-maintainer of sorts’ who has been instrumental in guiding and supporting this and all releases for a number of years now. And the author of a number of pivotal fixes and developments.

We are also grateful (and dependant upon) all update channel subscribers. My appologies for dragging my feed on re-establishing the stable subscription shop setup. All in good time and again, thanks to all those who so persistently help to keep us a-float. I’ll get the new shop sorted directly after a number of pressing matters here in development and in my own personal/business emigration elements.

I would like also to again thank all those participating in our forum and GitHub reporting and bug investigation. Unfortunately this first v4.1.0-0 to v4.5.0-0 development run has been a particularly tricky one with regard to community involvement. Due mainly to the massive changes required rendering the testing branch code essentially unusable for months at a time. On reflection, I think we should maybe have simply releases what we had on the planned (regular/frequent) release cadence. But our testing channel releases have maintained such a long history of being basically usable that it felt like going against the grain. But as a result many fewer folks were able to report issues, but on the other hand, how many “it doesn’t start” issues do we actually need? But to be fair we have always introduced the testing releases as experimental and known broken, as they have yet to be proven to work across many setups ‘in-the-field’, thus are considered broken by default. @Flox has begun some significant work on some far more advanced automated end-to-end testing that should improve our confidence prior to each testing release. But alas all things take time, and this particular release has taken far more than it’s fair share. So lets get right to the changelog for 4.5.0-0 (from v4.1.0-0):

Changelog summary:

Please note our new contributor @parth for their email fix on ‘local’ domain configs. My apologies for this fix taking so long to be release. We also have the super helpful @Hooverdan’s fix for the Scrub UI failing on large pools, a nice fix that has also taken a long time to see the light of day.

A gentle request

As as been our way, or mostly intended way, we have always encouraged, and been encouraged by, user feedback. The testing channel is king in this regard, especially given the massive number and far reaching nature of this release. We very much need this release tested to exhaustion. Please report here on the forum, in discrete threads, issue that your find that are not already identified in our GitHub repos. The intention, now we are back to hopefully more frequent releases, is to push things fast and often to the new ‘testing ground’ of the testing branch. We need to, as quickly as possible, get our entire project rid of it’s technical dept. And the changes in this release should help get us started this next journey.

As is, this release looks indistinguishable from v4.1.0-0, but rest assured, there are many changes, mainly in our dependencies, and many more to come, that all add up to our way forward. But we had to start somewhere and that where is here.

As we move and settle our dependencies, we can begin approaching a few more feature additions, especially given our much improved automated unit testing in this release and the QA testing to come.

Test away and report rapidly as we work against the forces of kipple.

Enjoy and report.

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v4.5.4-0

Released in Testing Channel updates on 17th January 2023.

Our first Stable Release Candidate built using Poetry.

Again we have a little more difference than the main developers would have liked. One of the remaining key legacy code components, Buildout, our prior build system, scuppered our intended interim releases of 4.5.1-0+ in the last couple of months. The intended-for-release code-state at that time failed the final rpm build due to a zc.sourcerelese (2012!!) dependency within our Buildout build system. We had a slight difference between how we build for development, and how we build for our rpm releases. This difference has now been removed along with all traces of Buildout. The replacement is the new shiny of Poetry. This needed to happen sooner rather than latter anyway. Hats-off to buildout and co for working (mostly) for all these years.

Immidiate roadmap

The above is intended primarily to help define our path to the next Stable release as quickly as possible. We do not have the resources, at least currently, to carry two build systems. And so we must move to have master branch (stable) and testing branch (testing) built by the same modern method.

Thanks

I would again like to thank all those who have practices such rigour and patience as to get us this far - both here on the forum and toiling away in the background. As stated before, we have had less than ideal release cadence as although we develop in the open via GitHub, such changes as have been required of late, has rendered rpm releases either un-buildable or otherwise unworkable. But a return to a more fervent release cadence is now foreseeable. In a major way this is down to user feedback. We do have, down to the efforts of the venerable @Flox, an ongoing effort to improve our automated testing. In this case via yet-another excellent open-source tool, mentioned previously, from our upstream of openSUSE: http://open.qa/. But that news is for another day. But while on the testing topic, if momentarily, we do now, via the %check scriptlet, run all our existing unit tests prior to each and every rpm build. Another improvement brought on by the somewhat forced re-jig of our entire build system. Note also the rocsktor-jslib and licensing clarification improvements referenced below.

Changelog summary:

Noteworthy is not an inconsiderable effort towards our new Leap 15.4 compatibility: I know, but better late than never. Plus some repo enhancements: that should help with further community involvement; again news for another post, post publication as it were.

A gentle request

(repeated for emphasis :slight_smile: )

As as been our way, or mostly intended way, we have always encouraged, and been encouraged by, user feedback. The testing channel is king in this regard, especially given the massive number and far reaching nature of recent changes. We very much need this release tested to its extremities. Please report here on the forum, in discrete threads, issues that you find that are not already identified in our GitHub repos. The intention, now we are back to hopefully more frequent releases, is to push things fast and often to the relatively new ‘testing ground’ of the testing branch. We need to, as quickly as possible, get our entire project rid of it’s technical dept. And the changes in these releases should help get us along the way of this next part of our journey.

Test away and report rapidly as we work against the forces of kipple.

Enjoy and report.

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4.5.5-0

Released in Testing Channel updates on 19th January 2023.

Our second Stable Release Candidate build using Poetry.

We had in 4.5.4-0 some trivial but important changed omitted that were related to our recent Poetry build system. This was inevitable and expected give the project wide changes required in switching our build system. We have also in this release bumped our rockstor-jslibs version in accordance with the package version: but no changes were actually included in this library (unlike in 4.5.4-0 where we slimmed it down some). This further field-tests this part of the update and to see if there are any un-forseen issues that may result from who we do that update. In house testing looks to have gone as expected however.

Thanks and a welcome

I would like to welcome in this release a fast fixer known on GitHub, ironically, as slowhand93 (suspected @Mark93 here on the forum); who earlier today fixed an issue opened all of 7 hours ago by myself. That was a surprise! Who many years ago now also contributed to our https://github.com/rockstor/rockon-registry.

And again special thanks to our forum moderator and all around intrepid @Flox who also did much of the diagnostic work for the path issues we faced, and fixed, in this 4.5.4-0 to 4.5.5-0 work.

We were able to find and fix these the below issue down to some excellent feedback here on the forum by @Jorma_Tuomainen, @Mark93, @aremiaskfa, @stitch10925, @agjbond007 along with others’ reports behind the scenes. As always much appreciation to you all. My apologies if I have omitted anyone in these attributions.

Changelog summary:

Test away and report rapidly as we work against the forces of kipple.

Enjoy and report.

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4.5.6-0

Released in Testing Channel updates on 25th January 2023.

Our third Stable Release Candidate

I’ll keep this release announcement short as I know there are folks in need of these fixes:

So 4.5.5-0 (RC2) had the disappointing but deep failure on config-upload. Bit of a show-stopper that one; but no matter as it’s fixed now in this next release. Thanks to the rapid and rabid work of our intrepid forum admin @Flox and newly active forum member @aremiaskfa. Thanks to you both for jumping on this one and getting us out of that little corner. This also makes @aremiaskfa our first of two new contributors. See also @stitch10925 who stitched up a hole we had in our local Rock-ons repo where we basically took on all files, without even filtering for .json: oh well; again it’s sorted now !!

Thanks and welcome

We had another good run on the feedback leading up to this latest 4.5.6-0 release. Thanks as always to @Flox, a key member of the core contributors, saving the day (release) yet again. And to our two new contributors @stitch10925, and @aremiaskfa. We also have the ongoing reports of confirmations and code maufunctioning from among others @Mark93.

Changelog summary:

Test away and report rapidly as we work against the forces of kipple.

Enjoy and report.

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4.5.7-0

Released in Testing Channel updates on 17th Feburary 2023

Our fourth Stable Release Candidate

So, getting there now; bit by bit. Again I’ll try and be brief/briefer as this is essentially a fairly simple set of changes.

Here we clear-up an older issue regarding an upstream btrfs change that we put-off in the last Stable milestone, but would now affect folks following our ongoing, and recently updated:
Installing the Stable Kernel Backport: https://rockstor.com/docs/howtos/stable_kernel_backport.html
We also continue to improve our licensing clarity, this time in our main README.md which is now, as of this rpm build, also noted as a license clarification file in our package. We finish off a long standing testing omission in our scrub parsing code, made all the more important as there had been contributions in that area that in turn increased the importance of testing there. And we now define our Rock-on base url at run-time: important for folks who must have this repository not hosted outside their network: thanks to our intrepid @Flox for this last Rock-on enhancement. A specialist area for @Flox as it goes.

We have also another contribution instigated by @aremiaskfa and followed up by myself (in code) on our now long-standing failure to restart the rockstor-bootstrap.service. This one will only take effect however on the next upgrade as this version 4.5.7-0 initiates the Web-UI upgrade to what comes next. So watch out for that when the time comes.

Changelog summary:

Test away and report rapidly as we work against the forces of kipple.

Enjoy and report.

[EDIT] We have now moved to Mastodon, I hope soon to replicate such announcements as this thread there. Link available on our main website: https://rockstor.com/
But if you do not yet have a Mastodon account the following is an invite to Mastodon.world:
https://mastodon.world/invite/bPRmMz2f that will auto follow @TheRockstorProject@mastodon.world
The existing Twitter account was never used and will be shutdown shortly.

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4.5.8-0

Released in Testing Channel updates on 7th March 2023

Our Fifth Stable Release Candidate

Some important config restore fixes in this one from the venerable @Flox. As always much appreciated.
Also thanks (again) to @Hooverdan on some investigative reporting re a quotas disabled - share creation blocker bug. All sorted now however. We also have the removal of some way-old Raid0 restrictions that no longer make sense, and we have, in the process, eased our way into future expansion on the btrfs-raid levels. More on that in coming releases I suspect, but I’m just guessing here mind :slight_smile: .

@aremiaskfa keep an eye out for the fix you instigated that was released in 4.5.7-0, as that will now come into play as that code version upgrades to what we have here. On that note, we have, hopefully finally, a fix for the fake upgrade message that was cosmetic in nature but psychological in effect. Again the field proof here will be when this version (4.5.8-0) is installed and then again in turn once our now multi-arch repos get populated with a newer version. Eyes on that one if we can folks.

Thanks and a welcome

I would also very much like to thank the forums/communities own long standing @Hooverdan for their excellent work here of late and over the years; and to announce their new Moderator status/badge. It looks good on them I think. So remember to dot your 'i’s and cross those 't’s: there’s yet another moderator about.

Changelog summary:

Slightly different format this time as we move to streamline our releases by adopting the GitHub auto-generated changelog for these forum posts. Note the reverse order from previous announcements.

Test away and report rapidly as we work against the forces of kipple.

Enjoy and report.

N.B. Remember our freshly minted Mastodon account:
@TheRockstorProject@mastodon.world
If you do not yet have a Mastodon account the following is an invite to Mastodon.world:
https://mastodon.world/invite/bPRmMz2f that will auto follow us upon sign-up.

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4.5.9-1

Our first release under our new non-profit / non-business Open Collective: The Rockstor Project
Stop by to see how our “Sustainability” goals are doing in our first full week.

Released in Testing Channel updates on 29th April 2023.

Our Sixth Stable Release Candidate

So 4.5.9-0 was all set to leave the barn (in the usually herd manner) when new and shiny Tumbleweed (but only in aarch64 garb mind) decided to play up a tad: as in fail to build. But no worries, it turns out it was fixed in a dependency of one of our dependencies, and related, as usual to some TW shiny (the compiler). Hence the less usual in our more recent releases “-1” nomenclature.

Briefly we have yet another fix from kanecko on GitHub: a nice (long awaited) Rock-on Web-UI scroll bar enhancement. Along with some major fixes from @Flox (AD stuff included) and from myself. Note however that @Hooverdan our forum moderator has also been well active in both that role and in issue/pr maintenance and such. Thanks, as usual, to all involved in this last (slightly longer) round of updates in testing. As always much appreciated. Also note that almost all these issues came from interaction with folks here on the forum.

Oh and did I mention we now have a bunch of new raid levels. Yes, I just did. Raid1c3 or raid1c4 anyone. And by the way; we also now surface and support mixed raid levels. Just saying.

Changelog summary:

Test away and report rapidly as we work against the forces of kipple.

Enjoy and report.

N.B. Remember our freshly minted Mastodon account:

If you do not yet have a Mastodon account the following is an invite to Mastodon.world:
https://mastodon.world/invite/bPRmMz2f that will auto follow us upon sign-up.

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4.6.0-0

Released in Testing Channel updates on 31st May 2023.

Our first release (since our last stable of 4.1.0-0) built from the master branch.
Our second release under our new non-profit / non-business Open Collective: The Rockstor Project
Stop by to see how our “Sustainability” goals are doing in our first full month.

Our Seventh Stable Release Candidate

This release is ear-marked as our next stable release. As usual we develop, and release, each stable rpm in the testing channel first. And this is what we have here (:crossed_fingers: no show-stoppers). There will always be issues; discovered later, or earlier and deemed less important than the associated fixes - but what we have here is the termination of the following GitHub Milestone:

In summary,this is the long awaited merge of our last testing run into the master branch which is intended for Stable channel maintenance releases. This was done prior to the actual stable release because we needed an end-to-end test of what will become our stable maintenance releases, plus chickens and eggs and all that. We have to start-end-start somewhere :). The master branch is intended to enable those depending on Rockstor in production as we again embark on our next testing run; this time to address our ageing Python related dependencies: next milestone to be created shortly.

As always I would like to thank all involved in the development and support of this community endeavour; specifically @Flox and @Hooverdan, who also hold Admin/core-contributor roles in our Open Collective; along with the project’s founder/prior maintainer @suman_chakravartula.

The numbered linked below detail all those who have assisted with each issue. Our GitHub derived changelog indicates only the final code contributor.

Changelog summary:

Test away and report rapidly as we work against the forces of kipple.

Special testing request: given the hopefully final RC status here: if folks could test and report upgrades from our last 4.1.0-0 stable release that would be invaluable for all the less technical folks and greatly assist in our endeavour here to serve broadly. The update may show as a .src rpm but that is cosmetic and addressed in the update itself.

Enjoy and report.

N.B. Remember our freshly minted Mastodon account:

If you don’t have a Mastodon account, the following is an invite to Mastodon.world; a fellow Open Collective:
https://mastodon.world/invite/bPRmMz2f that will auto follow us upon sign-up.

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4.6.1-0

Released in Testing Channel updates on 12th July 2023.

As per 4.6.0-0 before it, this was built from the master branch.

Our third release under our new non-profit / non-business Open Collective: The Rockstor Project
Stop by to see how our “Sustainability” goals are doing after our first two month.

A Stable release

4.6.0-0 was designated for release into our stable channel, but alas - all good plans and all that. Shopify (now no longer a concern of ours) had other ideas. Lets just say we were delayed by:

As such, the instructions for activating stable updates were then outdated (again). So given we had already started on the following Milestone re current stable maintenance (master branch):
4.6.0-0 Maintenance issues Milestone · GitHub we now have the following changes on from what was to be our first stable poetry built rpm:

Changelog summary

Special thanks to @Flox for creating us a shiny new semi-automated GitHub action cascade! Our ‘seperation of concerns’ multi-repo approach had its maintenance burden, especially at release intervals - this mechanism is invaluable to speeding up releases as we intend to do in our next testing phase (more on that in a new thread).

I would also like to thank @6ixfalls here on the forum for their excellent reporting and ‘catch’ (that I dropped) in 4.6.0-0 re the SSL Cert reconfig via Web-UI indicated in the changelog above.

And as always we are all indebted to @Hooverdan for their expertise and endeavours here on the forum and in our side-channel discussion. Many thanks.

Test away and report rapidly as we work against the forces of kipple.

There are very few code changes between 4.6.0-0 and 4.6.1-0 and from our prior Special testing request we have had little to worry on. But all the same - this stable rpm is released into testing first for two main reasons:

  • Testing (surprise).
  • Accessibility - our first stable release rpm is always released first into testing.

Enjoy and report.

Remember we are now on mastodon:

If you don’t have a Mastodon account, the following is an invite to Mastodon.world; a fellow Open Collective:
https://mastodon.world/invite/bPRmMz2f that will auto follow us upon sign-up.

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