Rudder 2.4.0

That release will be the second major open source release after the 2.3. It will be released in July 2012.

Our community members told us about numerous features they would really like to have in Rudder. So we determined which we would integrate in our next release.

The main goals of this release include :

• To allow Rudder to import and export Directives, Groups and Rules serialized into an XML file
• Renaming: Policy Templates are now called "Techniques", Policy Instances become "Directives" and Configuration Rules simply "Rules";
• Add some more Techniques in the library;
• http://www.rudder-project.org/redmine/issues/2040 rework the look of the event log screen;
• Enhance reporting capabilities;
• http://www.rudder-project.org/redmine/issues/1040: Add possibility to delete an accepted node;
• Allow to not automatically regenerate promises after a modification: http://www.rudder-project.org/redmine/issues/2145
• REST API to launch generation, reload Technique library : http://www.rudder-project.org/redmine/issues/2144
• Rudder should be able to manage the node in which Rudder server runs.
  Before that version, we forbade that possibility because we thought that it would have been dangerous.
  In fact, it may change Rudder server configuration which would broke all your configuration beetween the server and node linked to him.
  So in Rudder 2.5 you should be able to run an agent on the same machine and configure it with rudder
• Human readable error log.
  Rudder error log are kind of complicated.
  We would like to make them more understandable so you can find easier where do problems come.
• Safer password handling.
• Clones groups and directives..
  Sometimes you need to make another version of a directive or to take a subset of a group.
  But doing so is rather boring and unintuitive.
  We would like to offer you a way to make this quickly and efficiently.
• Apply rules on more than one groups/ make group of node groups.
  We don't know yet which one we'll implement in 2.5.
  But those solutions can permit you to apply a rule on more than one group at a time
• More detailed information from reporting
  Today, there's only one view of reports.
  With that version there's would me more possibilities for you to see reports.
  you would be able to navigate through component and key to get whatever you need
• Rights and authorization management
  Every user can do everything in rudder.
  We want that to be customable.
  That would be a first version of rights and it won't be very powerful (possibility to apply rules or not, to create techniques, only monitoring ..).
• And of course, correct bugs found in 2.3.

Details

Items import and export

The goal of that feature is to allow to export Groups, PI and CR to a file format that can be imported in another Rudder instance.

We also want to be able to preconfigure a list of such item to be automatically imported in Rudder, for example at boot time, to ease Rudder migration or initialisation.

Full specification

Architecture and update library version to last available

User story #1285: Cache des hashcode de case classes immutable

Question #2037: Remove snippet.Reports ?

Bug #1923: There are several println in the code

Update of the following librarie will be reported to 2.5: there is some big changes in Lift that will need a lot of tests.

• update Scala library to 2.9.1
• update Liftweb to 2.4-M4ou M5 suivant: https://groups.google.com/d/topic/liftweb/EOrnku3eQRg/discussion
• update JGit to 1.1 ⇒ http://www.eclipse.org/jgit/download/
• logback 1.0

Misc bugs

Bug #1536: The promises are not correctly reloaded from the git when the references commit doesn't exist anymore

Bug #1676: Trying to disable or delete a PI after creation is not taken into account

Techniques - Bug #1884: The addupdate target on the package installation PT is broken. We should enable it again when possible

Bug #1932: Updated PI is not selected in tree

Bug #2012: The historization of the group doesn't store if the group is static or dynamic

Manage Rudder with CFEngine

User story #856: Make promises in order to assure that Rudder services are still running

Techniques - User story #1509: Rudder should check if cron is launched and do something if it is down

Bug #1545: Fix hack for rudder-reports SuSE RPM

Update and migration scripts

User story #1906: PT update script

Bug #1497: We need an update script for Rudder

CSS and image normalization

Architecture #1954: unused/spread pictures

Architecture #1955: css normalization

Architecture #1958: css organization

Bug #1969: When there is an error with a deployement, the display is garbled in the upper right hand side corner

Bug #1929: No history icon.

Bug #2020: ugly behavior of the menu

UI updates

User story #1469: Popups to create items should be validated when hitting the return key

User story #1752, #2051,#2052: make selectable items more visible, for example in the "Configuration rule settings" screen

User story #1978: We should be able to reload the dynamic groups manually