27 Feb 20:13

f1858cb

0.8.22 Release

You can also read the news on our website

guid: 4884a54f-996a-4564-a138-38a70166fed7
author: Markus Raab
pubDate: Tue, 27 Feb 2018 19:35:58 +0100
shortDesc: Logo, INI, Lookup

We are proud to release Elektra 0.8.22!
In 429 commits, 8 authors changed 548 files with 60369 insertions(+), 6783 deletions(-).

What is Elektra?

Elektra serves as a universal and secure framework to access
configuration settings in a global, hierarchical key database.
For more information, visit https://libelektra.org.

For a small demo see here:

You can also read the FOSDEM interview and watch the FOSDEM main talk given recently.

Elektra is now an official part of Homebrew and
Alpine Linux.

Highlights

New Logo and Website Theme
INI plugin greatly improved
Notifications API and Bindings for Asynchronous I/O
Plugin Processes
Lookup with the Order Preserving Minimal Perfect Hash Map

New Logo and Website Theme

We are proud to present our new logo.
It has a new shape and cooler colors.

Thanks to Philipp Frei!

We also gave the website a new look. It has the colors from the logo and new
fonts (Lato and
Libre Franklin) that improve
readability and add to a unique look. The restructured start page contributes to
the new look as well.

We also updated asciinema-player to 2.6.0.

Thanks to Thomas Wahringer.

We also fixed security issues in the Website due to an old version of jquery,
thanks to Marvin Mall.

Thanks to Bernhard Denner for keeping our infrastructure running.

INI plugin greatly improved

dini is no longer experimental anymore and adds the binary plugin.
We added a crash test for the INI plugin that feeds the plugin with problematic input data we determined using AFL
We fixed various small bugs that could potentially cause the INI plugin to crash and fixes the problems as reported by AFL
The INI plugin now converts a section to a normal key-value pair if you store a value inside it. This has the advantage that you will not lose data unexpectedly anymore.
The INI plugin should now read most key-value pairs containing delimiter characters (=) properly.

Thanks to René Schwaiger!

Nevertheless, we did not switch to INI as default format.
This has some reasons:

In many workflows, dump is the better choice: e.g. with kdb editor you can edit any parts of Elektra with any format (e.g. INI) more safely.
(With the INI plugin in some of these situations meta data is wrongly shown.)
The code base of INI is not fully tested and partly not well understood.
We plan to switch to a newly written parser (most likely YAML) and want to avoid that users have two migrations.
The migration from dump is easier (especially compared with INI) because the dump format is recognisable without ambiguity.
(Thus the INI file parses nearly any file, it is hard to detect that a file is not INI)

But for those who want to switch, the migration will be smooth:
The dini plugin makes sure that old dump files are still being read.
Only when writing out configuration files, configuration files are converted to INI.
To change to INI during compilation, simply use:

-DKDB_DEFAULT_STORAGE=dini

Or simply switch for your installation with:

sudo kdb change-default-storage dini

You can also mount INI (or dini) as root:

sudo kdb mount default.ini / dini

Notification API and Bindings for Asynchronous I/O

This release contains an experimental implementation of Elektra's notification feature.
This feature enables applications to get updates when configuration is changed at run-time.
For more details see the preview tutorial at
doc/tutorials/notifications.md

The
Notification API
is implemented by a new library called elektra-notification.
To use the library you need the new internalnotification plugin.
Since the plugin is experimental it needs to be enabled when building Elektra
from source (e.g. by passing
-DPLUGINS="ALL;-EXPERIMENTAL;internalnotification" to cmake).

New bindings for asynchronous I/O called "I/O bindings" also have been added.
These bindings allow Elektra's plugins and other parts to perform asynchronous operations.
I/O bindings are opt-in for application developers.
New features of Elektra that take advantage of I/O bindings will have fallbacks where viable.
These fallbacks will use synchronous I/O thus keeping the status quo.

This release includes an experimental I/O binding for uv.
The interface for I/O bindings is currently experimental and might change in the future.

Elektra's notification feature is not complete yet.
So called "transport plugins" will be responsible for sending and receiving
notifications using different protocols or libraries (like ZeroMQ or D-Bus).
These plugins will make use of the new I/O bindings.
We plan to introduce the first transport plugins with the next release of Elektra.

Plugin Processes

A new library called pluginprocess
has been added. This library contains functions that aid in executing plugins in
a separate process. This child process is forked from Elektra's main process
each time such plugin is used and gets closed again afterwards. It uses a simple
communication protocol based on a KeySet that gets serialized through a pipe via
the dump plugin to orchestrate the processes.

Such a behavior is useful for plugins which cause memory leaks to be
isolated in an own process. Furthermore this is useful for runtimes or libraries
that cannot be reinitialized in the same process after they have been used.

Lookup with the Order Preserving Minimal Perfect Hash Map

The ksLookup (...) has a new search algorithm, that acts as an alternative to the
binary search. The Order Preserving Minimal Perfect Hash Map (OPMPHM) is a non-dynamic,
randomized hash map and is very effective for mostly static configurations.
The OPMPHM can be enabled for a search by passing the in kdbproposal.h
defined option KDB_O_OPMPHM to the lookup.
Be aware that if the KeySet changes often using the OPMPHM might not be a good
idea, read more about the OPMPHM.

When you are not sure if the OPMPHM will speed up you searches, wait for the next release,
that one will include a hybrid search algorithm that combines the best properties of
both search algorithms.

To disable OPMPHM (e.g. on systems with tight memory constraints), you can pass
-DENABLE_OPTIMIZATIONS=OFF

Other New Features

We added even more functionality, which could not make it to the highlights:

The Web UI was greatly improved, thanks to Daniel Bugl
The version of clusterd was increased from 1.0.0 to 1.1.0.
Elektra is now part of the official Homebrew repository. We still provide a
tap, if you want to install Elektra together with plugins or bindings that require
additional libraries.
The building and linking of the haskell bindings and haskell plugins has been
greatly improved.
The invoke library can now report errors upon opening/closing a plugin,
thanks to Armin Wurzinger.
The YAML CPP plugin does not require Boost anymore, if you
installed yaml-cpp 0.6.
Improved colored output in kdb tool.
We added two build jobs: docker and haskell.
Thanks to Bernhard Denner and Armin Wurzinger.
YAML CPP does not write binary data to a config file, if you forget to load the Base64 plugin.
YAML CPP now encodes empty binary keys as NULL values (~), and also adds the meta key binary for such values automatically.

Documentation

We improved the documentation in the following ways:

We have documented how you can setup a build node for Jenkins using a Docker container
We also provide an example Dockerfile based on Debian Stretch for that purpose,
thanks to Armin Wurzinger.
Document how rlwrap might be used for kdb shell.
Fixed docu in `...

Assets 2

22 Dec 12:07

markus2330

0.8.21

dfa9bb8

Release 0.8.21

0.8.21 Release

We are proud to release Elektra 0.8.21.

guid: 7f5de1b1-6086-47a6-9922-cac08c898ae7
author: Markus Raab
pubDate: Fri, 22 Dec 2017 09:24:02 +0100
shortDesc:

What is Elektra?

Elektra serves as a universal and secure framework to access
configuration settings in a global, hierarchical key database.
For more information, visit https://libelektra.org.

The news can be read rendered at our web server.

Highlights

In this release 8 authors created 307 commits and we changed 217 files (5227 insertions, 1914 deletions).
The highlights of the release are:

Fosdem Talk about Elektra was accepted
CC-licensed book about Elektra published
Maturing of plugins
Elektra with encryption
Preparation for switch to INI as default storage

Fosdem Talk about Elektra in Main Track

We are happy to announce that there will be a talk about
Elektra in one of the main tracks of Fosdem 2018:

Title: Configuration Revolution
Subtitle: Why it Needed 13 Years and How it Will be Done
Day: Saturday 2018-02-03
Start time: 15:00:00
Duration: 50 min
Room: K.1.105 (La Fontaine)

And a second talk in the Config Management DevRoom:

Title: Breaking with conventional Configuration File Editing
Subtitle: Puppet with a Key/Value API in a User Study
Day: Sunday 2018-02-04
Start time: 30:00
Duration: 25min
Room: UA2.114 (Baudoux)

See you in Brussels at 3 and 4 February 2018!

I will also be present in the Config Management Camp directly after Fosdem in Gent.

CC-licenced Book About Vision of Elektra Published

I am proud to release a book with the title "Context-aware Configuration" describing:

the last 13 years of Elektra (focus on last 4 years with the questionnaire survey and code analysis),
the current state of Elektra, and
the long-term goals of Elektra (context-aware configuration).

The Fosdem talk will cover some highlights from the book.

A huge thanks to everyone involved in the questionnaire survey,
without you we would not have been able to collect all the
information that led to the requirements for Elektra.

The LaTeX sources are available here
and the compiled book can be downloaded from here.

Maturing of Plugins

The new Directory Value plugin supports storage plugins such as YAJL and YAML CPP . It adds extra leaf values for directories (keys with children) that store the data of their parents. This way plugins that normally are only able to store values in leaf keys are able to support arbitrary key sets.
The YAML CPP plugin reads and writes YAML data using yaml-cpp. The plugin supports arrays, binary data and metadata.
The Camel plugin stores data as simplified YAML flow lists containing double quoted keys and values. For proper YAML support please use the YAML CPP instead.
The mINI plugin reads and writes simple property list, separated by equal (=) signs.
The xerces plugin allows Elektra to read and write XML data. The plugin uses Xerces-C++ for this task. It supports both arrays and metadata.
The boolean plugin normalizes boolean values such as 0, 1, true and false.
The crypto plugin and fcrypt plugin are described below.

Elektra With Encryption

The plugins fcrypt and crypto are now considered stable. They are no longer tagged as experimental.
While crypto encrypts individual values within configuration files, fcrypt encrypts and/or signs the whole configuration file.

For this release Peter Nirschl prepared a demo showing Elektra's cryptographic abilities:

Thanks to Peter Nirschl for this great work!

Switch to INI

We plan to switch to INI as default storage instead of Elektra's infamous internal dump format.

As preparation work we implemented the dini plugin which transparently
converts all dump files to ini files on any write attempt.
Furthermore, we fixed most of the INI bugs which blocked INI to be the
default storage.

Due to this progress we will likely switch to INI as default starting
with the next release. If you want to, you can switch now by compiling
Elektra with:

-DKDB_DEFAULT_STORAGE=dini

Or simply switch for your installation with:

sudo kdb change-default-storage dini

If you are already using ini as default, changing to dini will:

add some overhead because dini always checks if a file uses the dump
format, unless the dump plugin is not installed.
add support for binary values using the binary plugin

NOTE: INI (dini) was not completely ready for 0.8.21 thus we kept dump as default.
dini is currently an experimental plugin.

Other New Features

We added even more functionality, which could not make it to the highlights:

kdb rm now supports -f to ignore non-existing keys
use % as profile name to disable reading from any profile
The new function elektraArrayDecName:
```
int elektraArrayDecName (Key * key);
```
decreases the index of an array element by one. It can be used to reverse the effect of elektraArrayIncName,
thanks to René Schwaiger

Documentation

We improved the documentation in the following ways:

We renamed our beginner friendly issues to "good first issue" as recommended by GitHub.
In many parts of the documentation we already switched to American spelling
thanks to René Schwaiger
Added more automatic spelling corrections
thanks to René Schwaiger
Fixed many spelling mistakes
thanks to René Schwaiger
We extended the ReadMe of the jni plugin. The ReadMe now also contains information about the Java prerequisites of the jni plugin on Debian Stretch.
Improved notes about testing
thanks to Thomas Wahringer
qt-gui: give hints which package to install
The build phrases jenkins build all please and jenkins build doc please were documented
thanks to René Schwaiger
Documentation for libelektra-invoke was added

Compatibility

As always, the ABI and API of kdb.h is fully compatible, i.e. programs
compiled against an older 0.8 version of Elektra will continue to work
(ABI) and you will be able to recompile programs without errors (API).

All unit tests of 0.8.20 run successfully with Elektra 0.8.21.
There are, however, some additions and changes in rarely used interfaces:

added elektraArrayDecName and elektraArrayValidateName in libease
fixed kdbinvoke.h interface: make structure private and complete API
fixed xmlns and xsi:schemaLocation to be https://www.libelektra.org
the private header file kdbopmphm.h got nearly rewritten

Notes for Maintainer

These notes are of interest for people maintaining packages of Elektra:

We added the following files in this release:
- libelektra-dini.so
- libelektra-directoryvalue.so
- testmod_directoryvalue
The following plugins are not marked as experimental anymore:
- camel
- crypto
- mini
- xerces
- yamlcpp
The binding intercept-fs is now marked more clearly as experimental
The lua and jni plugins are again experimental because they do not work with some Lua/Java interpreters.

Notes for Elektra's Developers

These notes are of interest for people developing Elektra:

From now on release notes are written as part of PRs
Elektra Initiative is spelled as two words
At some more places we switched to use the logger, thanks to René Schwaiger
Shell Recorder got many improvements, see below in Testing.
Please use it.
The plugin's template now adds all placements within backends by default
(must be removed accordingly).
We now warn if plugins do not have any placement.
Please prefer -log and -debug builds
The build server now understands the build phrase jenkins build all please
thanks to René Schwaiger.
Please use it carefully, since it puts our build server under heavy load.
Markdown Shell Recorder Syntax recommended when reporting bugs.
Elektra's Dockerfile was improved and simplified, thanks to Thomas Wahringer.
Add more Explanations how to do Fuzz Testing
Started documenting disabled tests in doc/todo/TESTING
You now can use tests/icheck.suppression to disable already checked API changes.
The (hopefully) last Sourceforge references were removed and a redirection page was added,
thanks to @the-Arioch for reporting.

Testing

AFL unveiled some crashes in INI code
fix OCLint problems, thanks to René Schwaiger
fix ASAN problems, thanks to René Schwaiger
disabled non-working tests
Shell recorder
Benchmark optionally also works with OpenMP, thanks to Kurt Micheli
The Shell Recorder now uses kdb-static or kdb-full if kdb is not available (BUILD_SHARED=OFF)

Fixes

Many...

Assets 2

31 Oct 23:07

markus2330

0.8.20

01aa162

Release 0.8.20

0.8.20 Release

guid: 547d48e2-c044-4a8e-9d32-ca6b6fb914d9
author: Markus Raab
pubDate: Thu, 31 Oct 2017 23:08:07 +0200

What is Elektra?

Elektra serves as a universal and secure framework to access
configuration settings in a global, hierarchical key database.
For more information, visit https://libelektra.org.

Highlights

This is by far the largest release in Elektra's history.
In 2813 commits, 19 authors changed 1714 files with 92462
insertions(+) and 21532 deletions(-). The highlights are:

libelektra.org: new website and puppet-libelektra
plugin+bindings for Haskell and Ruby
improved shell completion
new plugins: yamlcpp, camel, mini, date, file, range,
multifile, xerces, ipaddr

libelektra.org

Unfortunately this release was delayed. The reason for the delay is that our
community server (build server, web site,...)
was compromised and we needed to reinstall everything from scratch.

We took advantage of the situation, and reinstalled everything properly
managed by puppet-libelektra.
With puppet-libelektra, you can directly set keys, specifications (validations),
and even mount new configuration files from within Puppet.

Our community server is now completely managed by libelektra.

Thanks to Bernhard Denner, for rescuing us from the difficult situation, especially
for the sprint shortly before the release.

As already already announced in December 2016
we completely reimplemented our website. Now all our websites are available via https.
This release is the first one that includes the source code of the website and its
snippet sharing functionality.

The backend for this snippet sharing website uses Elektra itself: both for its
configuration and for the configuration snippets.

Thanks again to Marvin Mall for the awesome website.

Haskell and Ruby

The Ruby binding, created by Bernhard Denner, was greatly improved and now
includes libtools bindings. It is the first binding that goes beyond Elektra's
main API. Bernhard Denner also added many
examples that
demonstrate how you can take advantage of the Ruby bindings.

Armin Wurzinger created a new binding
for the functional language Haskell. He also added support for
Haskell plugins.
Due to generic CMake and C Code, plugins can be written
exclusively in Haskell, without any glue code. Several Haskell
examples
already exist. The Haskell support is currently experimental.

Shell Completion

René Schwaiger added completion support for Fish
in this release. We also extended our support for other shells: The new
tool kdb complete suggests how to complete an Elektra path. It considers
mountpoints and also takes bookmarks into account. Thanks to Armin
Wurzinger for creating this useful utility. Our Zsh and fish completions
already take advantage of kdb complete. Thanks to Sebastian Bachmann
for taking the time to update the zsh completions.

New Plugins

See plugin overview
to get an overview of the ever-growing number of plugins.

The yamlcpp plugin
and camel plugin
add first support for YAML.

The mini plugin
is yet another minimal INI plugin.

Thanks to René Schwaiger.

The date plugin
supports validation of dates according to three standards:

RFC2822
ISO8601
POSIX

The multifile plugin
allows us to integrate many configuration files via globbing with
a single mount command. It supports .d configuration directories
as often used today.

The file plugin
interprets the content of a file as configuration value.

The ipaddr plugin
adds support for IP address validation on systems that do not
support getaddrinfo.

Thanks to Thomas Waser for creating these useful plugins.

The xerces plugin
supplants the xmltool plugin
and allows us to use XML files not following a specific schemata.
Attributes are mapped to Elektra's metadata, multiple keys with the
same names are mapped to arrays.

Thanks to Armin Wurzinger.

Documentation

The documentation was greatly improved within this release.

Added "Hello, Elektra" and logging tutorial,
thanks to René Schwaiger
extended FAQ
Christoph Weber (@krit0n) improved some tutorials
options are passed to PDFLaTeX compiler,
thanks to René Schwaiger
small fixes, thanks to Dominik Hofer
fix many spelling mistakes, use American english, fix formatting,
fix+add links, unify title style, fix code blocks, add titles
and fix the PDF manual
a big thanks to René Schwaiger

Features

We added even more functionality, which could not make it
to the highlights:

DBUS support for qt-gui (listening to configuration changes):
qt-gui gets a viewer-mode where configuration settings are immediately updated
via DBus notifications, thanks to Raffael Pancheri
With the new qt-gui and newer qt releases (~5.7) the qtquick experience is much smoother,
for example, the tree view does not collapse on syncs anymore.
Armin Wurzinger greatly improved the JNA binding.
The build system now uses Maven to build them. Armin also added Doxygen documentation
and a script
to test the JNA binding using Randoop.
The improved curlget plugin,
is now able to upload configuration files,
thanks to Thomas Waser and Peter Nirschl (CMake fixes).
New command kdb rmmeta, thanks to Bernhard Denner
crypto plugin and fcrypt plugin
- The configuration option gpg/key was renamed to encrypt/key
- The plugins now make sure that you configured them properly by
  validating key IDs
- thanks to Peter Nirschl
fcrypt plugin:
- The plugin now list available GPG keys when config is missing
- You can now specify signatures via the configuration option sign/key
- New text mode, enabled by default (disable by setting fcrypt/textmode to 0)
- New option fcrypt/tmpdir allows you to specify the output directory of gpg
- If you want to learn how to use the plugin please check out our new ASCII cast
- thanks to Peter Nirschl
Thomas Waser added useful scripts:
- mount-list-all-files
  to list all mounted files.
- mountpoint-info
  to provide more info about mountpoints.
- stash
  to stash away Elektra's configuration, to be restored using restore.
- backup
  to backup Elektra's configuration.
- restore
  to restore a backup or stash.
- check-env-dep
  allows users to check if environment has influence on configuration settings.
- change-resolver-symlink
  allows users to change the default resolver.
- change-storage-symlink
  allows users to change the default storage.
limit min/max depth for kdb ls (-mM), thanks to Armin Wurzinger.
conditionals: allow multiple assigns and conditions
base64 also works as filter for binary data (not just encrypted data),
thanks to René Schwaiger
csvstorage plugin:
compatibility with RFC 4180, thanks to Thomas Waser
gitresolver plugin:
improvements and update of libgit version, thanks to Thomas Waser
curlget plugin:
also allow uploading of configuration files, thanks to Thomas Waser

Compatibility

We added explicit to some C++ constructors in libtools and internally moved
some typedefs. ModulesPluginDatabase now has protected members (instead
of private). This might break code in special cases, but should not affect binary
compatibility. As always we tested for binary compatibility.
This time we had to revert some changes to keep libelektra-tools
ABI compatible.

Furthermore:

scripts now work on macOS (readlink and sed),
thanks to Armin Wurzinger and René Schwaiger
generalized error #60, "invalid line encountered"
added new errors #164 - #187
added private headerfiles kdbglobal.h, `...

Assets 2

22 Dec 17:34

markus2330

website-release

8dcc6f7

Website Release

guid: 102b84a3-c41e-485c-8fe2-f12a24b3fbfd
author: Marvin Mall
pubDate: Thu, 22 Dec 2016 17:46:19 +0100
shortDesc: introduces new Elektra website with snippet sharing

Highlight

Release of new Elektra website with an integrated service for
sharing of configuration snippets.
The website also supports conversion between different
configuration formats.
Website structures documentation and news sections in a new way.

Introduction

With Elektra developing into a more and more reliable as well as
popular system to manage system configurations, the demand for a
better public appearance increases as well. For this reason, we
are happy to be able to announce the release of our new
website!

The new website does not only give us a chance to better present
ourselves to the open world, it also enables us to structure our
project documentation better. We hope that this will make it easier
for our users to get started with Elektra and all of its awesome
features!

Besides the documentation, the website does also include a database
that can be used to share, search, download and convert configuration
snippets in various formats. We hope that this tool helps developers
and administrators, but also anyone else to simplify their
configuration processes when they have to look for a specific
configuration snippet. Btw. with snippet we mean that you can
also share parts of configuration files that you find particular
useful!

But sharing of snippets does not only help other users, it can help
yourself as well because you can search for them easier. You also
have access to the snippets in various formats at any time, allowing
you to use them across multiple system by mounting them with the
curlget resolver!

The Website

The website was written by Marvin Mall in the course of his
bachelor thesis
as part of the front-end he developed for his snippet sharing service.
His main goals were to create a proper appearance for Elektra, but
also to create a platform that promotes his service. We think that
this worked out quite well by connecting the website with the service
the way it was done.

Documentation

An important aspect of the new website was to make existing documentation
more transparent and structured. A lot of documentation files have been
changed to achieve this goal and an equal amount of effort was put into
writing a system that decouples the documentation structure on the
website from the structure used within the Elektra repository.

The tutorials section was partially reworked to make the first steps
together with Elektra easier for our users. Clearly the effort put into
the tutorials is worth it. Thanks to Erik Schnetter for the valuable
feedback where improvements are needed and Christoph Weber for (re)writing
the tutorials!

We should note -- as always in software -- that the structure on the website
is not final yet and will definitely develop over time, especially the
bindings and libraries sections will get some more attention.

If you are interested in the techniques we use to structure our files,
you can have a look at the
rest-frontend readme.
The website is already the fourth view of our markdown pages!
The others are man pages, doxygen, and github.

Homepage & News

Besides the documentation we also wanted a place to properly present
ourselves and our news around Elektra. For this reason we created a new
home page which shall give an overview of what Elektra is and can do.
Additionally to that, we also added a news section to keep you better
up-to-date!

We hope that you enjoy our new appearance as much as we do!

Snippet Sharing

Another important part of the website and also without doubt the part
that took most effort to create, is the service that allows for sharing
of configuration snippets. It is run by a REST service fully built with
the help of CppCMS on basis of Elektra as
data store. All data concerning snippets and user accounts is stored
in Elektra's key database (of course with password being properly hashed).

The service allows you to paste configuration snippets in various (supported)
formats and to tag, describe and name them. This in return allows you to
search snippets by keywords and to download them -- even in other formats than
the format used for uploading.

Clearly the service is meant to be driven by its users. Therefore we ask
you to share your own configuration snippets, maybe they can be of help, e.g.,
be a time saver for someone else!

Snippets shared with the service are
BSD licensed.
The snippets can also be downloaded directly as bundle from a separate
GitHub repository.
As soon as a snippet is added, changed or deleted on the website, a job
that updates the repository is triggered. So you can expect the repository
to be always up-to-date.

NoScript

The website is fully written with the help of AngularJS and is therefore
heavily based on JavaScript. This should be no issue though as the
website does only use resources that can be found in the official Elektra
repository:

So in case you cannot or do not want to use JavaScript, you
can find all resources also here.
If you are only worried about executed untrusted JavaScript,
you can study and improve the
Web Frontend,
which builds the website.
Based on this, we hope you disable NoScript for our page
so that you are able to share snippets!

Domains

All Elektra Domains directly hosted by us are now only served by https.
The former http sites are only redirects to https. This might cause
trouble with some software, e.g., update /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb     [trusted=yes] https://build.libelektra.org/debian/ wheezy main
deb-src [trusted=yes] https://build.libelektra.org/debian/ wheezy main

The build Server is no longer reachable at port 8080, but now only directly at
https://build.libelektra.org/.

The new RestApi serves as backend
for the website. For the docu, simply visit the site with your browser.

While most libelektra.org now point to the new website, you can still
directly go to github and also to the
bug tracker.

The old Wordpress installation was shut down because of security concerns.

Feedback

At this point there is not much more to say about the new website except for:
Feel free to explore it!

We greatly appreciate all feedback, be it for the website, the snippet sharing
service or other parts of the Elektra project. We always have an open ear
for suggestions and we also like to help with technical issues, simply
leave us a note on github!

Stay tuned!

Subscribe to the reimplemented
RSS feed
to always get the release notifications.

For any questions and comments, please contact the
mailing list,
use the issue tracker on github
or write an email to elektra@markus-raab.org.
For issues or feedback concerning the website, you can also
contact us at website@libelektra.org.

Permalink to this NEWS entry

For more information, see https://libelektra.org

Best regards,
Marvin & Markus

Assets 2

22 Nov 21:35

markus2330

0.8.19

0a1c700

0.8.19 Release

guid: 8e05231a-4f3d-488b-8dc2-5f0d5c474c39
author: Markus Raab
pubDate: Tue, 22 Nov 2016 22:04:59 +0100

What is Elektra?

Elektra solves a non-trivial issue: how to abstract configuration
in a way that software can be integrated and reconfiguration can
be automated. Elektra solves this problem in a holistic way.
Read why Elektra
for an explanation of why such a solution is necessary. It can be seen as a
virtual file system
for configuration files.

Highlights

more tutorials and getting started guides
new Ruby bindings
cleanup of core (only 124K for main library on Debian/amd64)

Ruby Bindings

We now provide Ruby bindings for Elektra. The bindings are based on the
C++ bindings and are generated by SWIG. A strong focus was put on a good
integration with standard Ruby features and conventions, such as naming
conventions, predicates, key and meta data iteration...

A short introduction
shows some basic usage scenarios. More detailed examples can be found in the
examples directory.

A big thanks to Bernhard Denner!

Cleanup of Core

Following methods were hidden (static) or removed:

mount* methods
trie* methods
backend*
split*
keyGetParentNameSize
keyGetParentName

These are dozens of methods and it was required to adapt
the unit tests to work with the hidden methods.

A big thanks to Kurt Micheli!

Usability

Improved many error messages
- spelling
- be more friendly to the user
- capitalization
- mention sudo !!
kdb set: do not print what was not done
kdb editor handles non-modified files (will not do anything)
Be more chatty about what kdb does, can be disabled with -q or
/sw/elektra/kdb/#0/current/quiet.
Furthermore, -v now tells even more details (e.g. kdb-import outputs
the key about to import)

Plugins

New

c plugin generates C code that represents
configuration. This is useful for unit tests or if you need to have hard-coded
fallback configuration in your C application.
base64 plugin allows you to encode
binary data. This is especially handy in combination with the
crypto plugin
to avoid problems with non-printable characters in configuration files.
(Thanks to Peter Nirschl)
fcrypt plugin allows you to
fully encrypt configuration files. They are only decrypted when applications
access them. (Thanks to Peter Nirschl)
required plugin rejects
every key that is not required by an application.
simple spec lang allows you
to define metadata for enum
and required in a more compact way.

Major Enhancements

simpleini got a configurable
format in which it will read and write configuration files. For example, one
can use format=% -> % to have key -> value.
enum got support for multi-enums,
i.e., multiple separated values within one value. The error reporting was improved,
too. (Thanks to Thomas Waser)
glob accepts a list of named flags
instead of an integer value and aborts matching after first hit.
(Thanks to Felix Berlakovich)
hosts now only accepts ipv4 and
ipv6 keys.
(Thanks to Felix Berlakovich)

Development

In the perpetual effort to improve software quality, we made several improvements:
(This information is mainly intended for Elektra's developers.)

A new logger encourages developers to write more comments (ELEKTRA_LOG)
ELEKTRA_ASSERT prints better messages on failure and does not need && trick.
get rid of previous VERBOSE macro at many places.
Many assertions were added in the low-level helpers (memory management)
Using the assertions we fixed some undefined behavior.
(Thanks to Thomas Waser)
added new configure-debian-debug and configure-debian-log helper scripts
The build server now checks if builds with active logger and debugging
work correctly.
Improved Coding Style in crypto_botan (thanks to Peter Nirschl)
add external-links.txt to outputs
(The file is generated in the build directory and contains
all external-links. To validate them, use ./scripts/link-checker)
(Thanks to Kurt Micheli)
markdownlinkconverter handles directories correctly (using stat).
(Thanks to Kurt Micheli)
Fixed compiler warning caused by libxml2 (different behavior since 2.9.4),
thanks to René Schwaiger
added often used links in main README
Improve documentation about failing test cases and what to do about it.
added decisions about plugin_variants
and array.
(Thanks to Marvin Mall)
Rename to metadata, metakey, mountpoint
(Thanks to Peter Nirschl)
std::ios_base::showbase can be used to output metadata when streaming keys (C++)
New infos/status: readonly, writeonly, limited
(Thanks to Marvin Mall)
The tool update-infos-status orders infos/status and allows devs to easily add/rem
entries. (Thanks to Kurt Micheli)
Automatic setting of infos/status: nodoc, nodep, unittest, memleak, configurable
(Thanks to Kurt Micheli)
Improve create_lib_symlink, add PLUGIN argument
and make it useful also for other library symlinks.
New markdown style applied to most markdown files.
(Thanks to Marvin Mall)
Tracer is now disabled, even for ENABLE_DEBUG.
(Thanks to Marvin Mall)
Updated SECURITY document
Macro naming convention ELEKTRA_, added kdbmacros.h
ENABLE_DEBUG also works with clang and ENABLE_ASAN now allows devs
to additionally enable sanitizers.
Thanks to Gabriel Rauter.

Compatibility

It is now possible to enquiry which plugins provide a specific format.
This needed changes in libtools, which got a new major revision.
Changes in the plugin's contract are fully compatible:
You can now use storage/ini instead of storage ini in infos/provides
which gives you the information that ini is a storage format (and not
anything else the plugin might provide). For compatibility reasons,
the build system still adds storage ini even if only storage/ini
is specified.

That means that kdb mount file.json /examples/json json still will find
json plugins even if they are not called json but
yajl.

Another breaking change in libtools is that appendNamespace was renamed
to prependNamespace.

Error messages changed a bit, so if you tried to parse them, make sure
to make the e of error case-insensitive ([eE]).

In the C++ binding, rewindMeta is now const and some methods
to check if a key is in a namespace were added.

The intercept libraries were moved to a common
folder.
They can now be included or excluded like other BINDINGS.
For consistency reasons the libraries were also renamed
(libelektraintercept-fs.so and libelektraintercept-env.so.0),
but symlinks allow you to link against their old names
(lib/libelektraintercept.so and lib/libelektragetenv.so.0).

Package Maintainers

This information is intended for package maintainers.

GI Bindings were removed from BINDINGS=ALL.
It is recommended to use SWIG bindings instead, which
will be added with ALL.
Intercept libraries are part of BINDINGS.
They will be added on glibc systems where BINDINGS=ALL is used.
Documentation in textfiles is now ...

Assets 3

16 Sep 23:39

markus2330

0.8.18

70e3434

0.8.18 Release

guid: 190576e0-9fef-486e-b8da-c4e75be08329
author: Markus Raab
pubDate: Fri, 16 Sep 2016 23:31:27 +0200

What is Elektra?

Elektra serves as a universal and secure framework to access configuration
parameters in a global, hierarchical key database.
For a small demo see here:

Highlights

Intercept open syscalls which allows Elektra to dynamically
generate config files from Elektra's database
Experimental version of cryptographic plugins
A new zsh completion file (next to the bash completion file)
Gitresolver allows to directly read and write config files
from git instead of files present in the file system.
Survey completed successfully (and debts paid), we are now
preparing raw data.

Crypto Plugin

Gpg is now used to decrypt a master password, which is used
by the individual crypto backends. So all necessary parts
for encryption of decryption of individual keys is present.

Furthermore, a new botan backend
was implemented.

See here

Thanks to Peter Nirschl.

Open Interception

When Elektra directly modifies config files which are on the disc,
and applications read the config files without Elektra, Elektra has
no control over the access, e.g. we cannot dynamically calculate
values. To avoid this, we wrote a library that
intercepts the open-call.

Together with the mozprefs plugin, we got control over the configuration
of Firefox and can dynamically change config values with all possibilities
Elektra provides.

For easy setup, we implemented the script configure-firefox.

See here

Thanks to Thomas Waser.

Resolver

Resolvers in Elektra are the code that are responsible to determine where
content should be read from and stored to. They are independent of the
actual configuration file syntax.

The gitresolver
allows you to get/store config data in git.

The blockresolver
allows Elektra to take control of parts of the configuration
file. This is useful for config files such as vim or zsh, which contain
program code. The plugin allows you to split config files with special markers
into parts containing code and others controlled by Elektra.

zsh completion

Added zsh completion file, and a script (kdb install-sh-completion)
that installs bash+zsh completion when the default installation places
do not work (e.g. for Mac OS X).

Thanks to Sebastian Bachmann.

Documentation

fix kdb-import man page, thanks to Kurt Micheli
mark keyIsSystem/keyIsUser as internal
fix doxygen reference to example
better document that global-mount or gmount will overwrite
previously mounted global plugins
fix spelling mistake, thanks to René Schwaiger
Wrote tutorial how to use Elektra-python bindings,
thanks to Ulrike Schäfer

Quality

shell recorder test cases now run during make test, thanks to Kurt
Micheli and René Schwaiger (Warning: might remove present keys
when it conflicts with their mountpoints)
find-tools now is pep and pyflakes happy, thanks to Kurt Micheli
fix bashism, thanks to Thomas Waser and Kurt Micheli
better error message for conditionals plugin, thanks to Thomas Waser
better error message for augeas plugin, thanks to Felix Berlakovich
Many compilation warnings fixed, thanks to Gabriel Rauter, Thomas Waser
GSettings: fix double free, thanks to Gabriel Rauter
Fix external links and implement an external link checker,
thanks to Kurt Micheli
Fix openwrt/musl warnings with wrong printf format, thanks to
Thomas Waser
Fix NODEP metadata, allows you to build all plugins that do not
have dependencies.

Compatibility

Libtools

Libtools got a new major version (SOVERSION 0 -> 1):

backend/plugin configs are now validated by plugins (needed
by gpg plugin, which checks if wrong key IDs are supplied during mount)
resolveRecommends was never implemented and was now removed

Plugins

The plugins conditionals and mathcheck are incompatible in some cases
because of changes in syntax.

Proposal

New API: keyRel2 which differs from keyRel by allowing you to
specify which relation should be checked.

Development

github descriptions+workflow (displayed by github when creating
PRs and issues)
new trigger phases for github, see
doc/GIT
thanks to Mihael Pranjić
valgrind suppressions are great again, thanks to Peter Nirschl
Plugins get a new namespace internal which can be used for meta-data
that is not relevant for other plugins.
kdberrors.h is only generated once, which allows us to use other build
systems, thanks to René Schwaiger
INCLUDE_SYSTEM_DIRECTORIES in add_plugin allows you to add a include
path where warnings are suppressed (useful for boost).
infos/provides now allows multiple entries

Packaging

Plugin-provider CRYPTO can be used to enable/disable all crypto
plugin variants (not enabled by default because its experimental).
Config option ENABLE_OPTIMIZATIONS, enable by default: trade more
memory for speed (can be turned off on embedded systems)
INSTALL_SYSTEM_FILES is now off by default on Mac OS X.
bash-completion is installed to where pkg-config tells us,
thanks to Gabriel Rauter
(fallback is now /usr/share/bash-completion/completions/kdb)
was /etc/bash_completion.d/kdb (removed)
zsh is now installed to /usr/share/zsh/vendor-completions/_kdb
(except for Darwin, where /usr/local/share/zsh/site-functions is used)
removed /etc/profile.d/kdb.sh: the script elektraenv.sh was
removed (and is no longer installed), superseded by elektrify-getenv
added scripts install-sh-completion configure-firefox elektrify-open
added plugins libelektra-blockresolver.so libelektra-boolean.so
libelektra-crypto_botan.so libelektra-crypto_openssl.so
libelektra-desktop.so libelektra-mozprefs.so libelektra-passwd.so
added tests testmod_blockresolver testmod_boolean
testmod_crypto_botan testmod_crypto
gcrypt testmod_crypto_openssl testmod_mozprefs testmod_passwd
test_opmphm_vheap test_opmphm_vstack
added test data blockresolver mozprefs passwd

Other

Conditionals and mathcheck plugins got support to specify relative
keys, thanks to Thomas Waser
kdb command-list: commands are written in bold
GSettings backend can be build standalone, thanks to Gabriel Rauter
first data structures for order preserving minimal perfect hash map,
thanks to Kurt Micheli
added a new passwd plugin, thanks to Thomas Waser
boolean
plugin to normalize boolean values, thanks to Thomas Waser
desktop
plugin to detect which desktop currently is running (supports kde,
gnome, tde, unity or any other XDG conformant desktop)
doc/paper contains some info for joss

Get It!

You can download the release from
here
and also here on github

name: elektra-0.8.18.tar.gz
size: 2582183
md5sum: 62fe0fbf9ee57ffaa58a982f602f596a
sha1: 743484e16b102a00cd58956a49f0c558939d56a8
sha256: 9ee65895ba5cba6736c13c264637664c1410b25f4aaaeac8f1f83712ff93d53b

This release tarball now is also available
signed by me using gpg

already built API-Docu can be found here

Stay tuned!

Subscribe to the
RSS feed
to always get the release notifications.

For any questions and comments, please contact the
Mailing List
the issue tracker on github
or by email elektra@markus-raab.org.

Permalink to this NEWS entry

For more information, see http://libelektra.org

Best regards,
Markus

Assets 2

15 Jun 16:42

markus2330

0.8.17

47d80cb

0.8.17 Release

http://doc.libelektra.org/news/e6153a39-c4bd-41c3-bc86-785d451eb6c5.html

Assets 3

29 Apr 15:28

markus2330

0.8.16

2292b0f

0.8.16 Release

In case you do not yet know about it, here is an abstract about Elektra:

Elektra serves as a universal and secure framework to access configuration
parameters in a global, hierarchical key database.
Elektra provides a mature, consistent and easily comprehensible API.
Its modularity effectively avoids code duplication across applications
and tools regarding configuration tasks. Elektra abstracts from
cross-platform-related issues and allows applications to be aware of other
applications' configurations, leveraging easy application integration.

Elektra consists of three parts:

LibElektra is a modular configuration access toolkit to
construct and integrate applications into a global,
hierarchical key database. The building blocks are:
- language bindings (inclusive high-level interfaces)
- GenElektra, the code generator for type-safe bindings
- plugins for configuration access behaviour and validation
SpecElektra is a configuration specification language
that is easy to use and self-contained in the same key database (i.e.
written in any of the configuration file formats Elektra supports).
Tools on top of LibElektra for administrators, such as CLI tools and GUIs.

See http://libelektra.org

The same text as follows is also available
here as html
and
here on github

Highlights

Elektra now allows applications to support multiple
profiles with a plugin, thus without code modifications in
Elektra applications.
That means a user can select multiple configuration files to use,
even if the application has no explicit support for it.
It completes the cascading feature (level $HOME before /etc), to allows
us also to select different configuration for the same level.
Resolver can now better handle conflicts that happen
when files are removed and others that happen
within a single time tick (resolution of your clock)
and also better handles NFS and older file systems
Default storage and resolver can be changed by symlink.
So no need to recompile Elektra to change the default storage
from INI to dump.
INI now works quite reliable as default plugin and already
used by default by its author Thomas Waser.

Other important features

shell plugin allows you to execute shell commands on every KDB access
and curlget plugin allows you to download configuration files
from a URL during KDB access.
Improvements in sync/merge of qt-gui with important fix
(Usage of 0.8.15 qt-gui is discouraged)
Add plugin for dpkg database (read-only)
Assignment for conditionals using assign/condition.
Support for multiple and nested statements
Support for condition/validsuffix which allows you to suffix
numbers with signs such as % or $.
It does not check if the suffixes are identical.
kdb mount now uses topological sorting to always
find a dependency solution if there is one,
many effort was put in that ordering is as requested, thanks to
Thomas Waser for the topological sorting implementation
Frontend generated by GenElektra now also can reload its
values with taking the correct context into account.
Source is now automatically formatted and formatting is checked on build server
More flexible CMake syntax for PLUGINS

Plugins

Many new or vastly improved plugins are waiting to be explored.

curlget

The plugin curlget fetches a configuration file from a remote host before
the configuration is being accessed:

kdb mount -R noresolver /tmp/curltest.ini system/curltest ini curlget url="https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ElektraInitiative/libelektra/master/src/plugins/ini/ini/plainini"
kdb ls system/curltest  # every get access will redownload the file

Thanks to Thomas Waser!

INI

The INI plugin is still under heavy development and
was again nearly rewritten:

fixed key is below hacks
fixed ordering
custom delimiter
use meta array for comments
rewritten ordering
best effort order
fixed array support

Thanks to Thomas Waser!

shell

This plugin allows you to executes shell commandos after kdbGet, kdbSet and kdbError (failing kdbSet):

kdb mount /tmp/test.ini system/shelltest ini array= shell 'execute/set=echo set >> /tmp/log,execute/get=echo get >> /tmp/log'
kdb set system/shelltest
cat /tmp/log

Thanks to Thomas Waser!

validation

The validation plugin is not new, but got many new features.
It allows you to match values by a regex and set your own
error messages in case a validation did not match.

Up to now, the regex was given as is to regcomp, which means
that if the regex is contained anywhere in the value, the
value is accepted.

Often this is not what we want, thus Thomas Waser added special
support for icase, word and line validation.
Additionally, flags allow you now to ignore the case or invert
the match. This can be changed for every individual value
or for the whole mountpoint.

Additionally, kdb vset validation was updated to use the new
metadata and correctly match against the whole value.

Thanks to Thomas Waser!

hosts

Only minor improvements were necessary for the host plugin but
it is quite matured already. The contract was changed so that
ipv6 addresses for ipv4 addresses will be rejected:

# kdb mount --with-recommends /etc/hosts system/hosts hosts
# kdb set system/hosts/ipv4/localhost ::1
The command set failed...
Reason: localhost value: ::1 message: Address family not supported
# kdb set system/hosts/ipv6/localhost ::1

You can also comfortably and safely edit the hosts file
with: kdb editor system/hosts hosts, then you have the
functionality sudoedit for the hosts file.

rename

Again not a new plugin, but the plugin was greatly improved
and many test cases were added.

Now you can set upper/lowercase individually for both sides:

What applications see.
What the configuration file contains.

For example, if you always want the keys in the configuration file upper case,
but for your application lower case you would use:

$ kdb mount caseconversion.ini /rename ini rename get/case=tolower,set/case=toupper
$ kdb set user/rename/section/key valu
$ cat ~/.config/caseconversion.ini
[SECTION]
KEY = value

Thanks to Thomas Waser!

Resolver

Resolving by ~ as home directory now also for system and spec namespaces,
thanks to Thomas Waser.

Files keep their previous owner, useful when root edits configuration
files of others, thanks to Thomas Waser.

The resolver has many improvements to better detect conflicts.

The lock is now extended longer after the commit and already requested
in the temporary file.

The warnings were improved when getcwd fails.

Resolver now can correctly handle conflicts with empty files. It can also
better cope with frequent commits of the same binary. Elektra already
reached some limits filesystems have.

Bindings

Java

Marvin Mall improved the Java binding, fixed the appending
of keysets, added lots of documentation, and many unit tests.

C++

Some kind of misusage of vaargs is now detected at compile-time instead
of crashing at runtime.

Generated C++

Value now supports convenience activations.
Values can be used to activate context, no more layers are needed.
Topological sorting makes sure that values are activated in the
correct order, loops are not allowed anymore.

The bool operator< is now correctly inline (allows to use it in more than
one translation unit)

Documentation

René Schwaiger reworked most of the documentation and
fixed countless spelling mistakes and other problems.

Peter Nirschl updated the status of the crypto-plugin
and fixed a typo
Daniel Bugl wrote a cascading tutorial
Daniel Bugl fixed all broken links
René Schwaiger also drew a new logo with SVG.
It is already used on github as avatar for the organisation.
make all é use the same code point 233.

Testing

Tests work if the build path contains spaces
Tests: Fix problems locating memory checker
remove obsolete TestScript.cmake

Thanks to René Schwaiger

Maintainer

By default now ALL plugins except EXPERIMENTAL are included.
Plugins will be automatically excluded if dependencies are missing.

The PLUGINS syntax was vastly improved. Now many categories can be
intermixed freely and also categories can be used for exclusion.

E.g. to include all plugins without deps,
that provide storage (except yajl) and are maintained, but not include all plugins
that are experimental, you would use:

-DPLUGINS="NODEP;STORAGE;-yajl;MAINTAINED;-EXPERIMENTAL"

Details see /doc/COMPILE.md.

Renamed files:

/usr/include/elektra/merging/kdbmerge.hpp ->
/usr/include/elektra/merging/mergingkdb.hpp

/etc/profile.d/kdb -> /etc/profile.d/kdb.sh

(So that it works on arch linux, thanks to Gabriel Rauter)

removed files:

/usr/lib/elektra/libelektra-crypto.so

was only necessary because of limitations of the build system and is
now removed. It never had actual functionality, but was only a stub
without a crypto provider selected.

new files:

/usr/include/kdbease.h
/usr/lib/elektra4/libelektra-curlget.so*
/usr/lib/elektra4/libelektra-dpkg.so*
/usr/lib/elektra4/libelektra-profile.so*
/usr/lib/elektra4/libelektra-resolver_fm_hpu_b.so
/usr/lib/elektra4/libelektra-shell.so*

more new files with ALL or EXPERIMENTAL:

/usr/lib/elektra/libelektra-semlock.so

new tests all in folder /usr/lib/elektra/tool_exec:
testcpp_contextual_update testkdb_conflict test_keyname testmod_curlget
testmod_dpkg testmod_jni testmod_profile testmod_semlock testmod_shell
testtool_mergingkdb

Following Plugins are excluded on specific platforms:

mathcheck on Intel compiler (reason: failing test cases)
simpleini on non-glibc systems (rea...

Assets 2

17 Feb 07:43

markus2330

0.8.15

d0925d1

0.8.15 Release

guid: 1ab4a560-c286-46d2-a058-1a8e7e208fe8
author: Markus Raab
pubDate: Tue, 16 Feb 2016 17:47:00 +0100

In case you do not yet know about it, here is an abstract about Elektra:

See http://libelektra.org

Overview

This is one of the largest release up to now. It includes many
user-visible improvements. Some highlights:

Mounting is vastly improved:
think about Debian's "dpkg" to "apt"-like functionality
In previous releases you could already specify the structure
of the configuration. Now you can also automatically enforce
this property.
We split the shared library libelektra into smaller parts.
Now users can link against the parts of the library they need.
As always, the ABI and API is fully forward-compatible.
The release contains improvements in the
bootstrapping process.
We improved the ini, rename and crypto plugins.
The tool kdb now supports bookmarks and profiles.
The new tool kdb editor allows you to edit KDB configuration in
your favorite text editor.
We are glad of the new packages for Debian, Arch Linux and OpenWRT.

The same text as follows is also available
here as html
and
here on github

Global Mount

Sometimes you simply want some functionality for the whole key database.
For example, you want to enable logging or notification of configuration
changes. In previous versions, you had to change every mountpoint
individually. Even more problematic, every mountpoint created its
individual logs and notifications, without any way for someone to know
if an application has issued its last log/notification.

These problems are now solved by global plugins. The same plugins are
reused for this purpose. Also the mounting works nearly in the same way,
you only have to omit the configuration file and the mountpoint:

kdb global-mount syslog journald dbus

Voilà, from now on every configuration change gets logged to syslog
and journald. Additionally, every application gets notified via dbus.

If you want it more verbose for debugging, you can easily do so by:

kdb global-mount logchange counter

Which gives you detailed information to standard output which keys
were changed/edited/deleted. Additionally, Elektra counts how often
the counter plugin is invoked.

The underlying work for the global plugins, i.e. hooks in the core
libraries and the list plugin that allows us to use many plugins
without bloating the core was done by Thomas Waser.

It was already possible in earlier versions of Elektra to specify the
configuration of your program. Until now, this specification could be
mainly used to to generate code as described
here.
This release adds two more interesting options:

the spec plugin, and
the spec mount.

Spec Plugin

The most important global plugin that is now newly introduced with this
release (thanks to Thomas Waser) is the spec plugin. By default it
will be added for every global-mount. So for a new installation make
sure you executed at least once:

kdb global-mount

The spec plugin is a global plugin that copies metadata from the
spec-namespace to other namespaces. That means, it reads the
specification, and makes sure that the configuration conforms to it. The
actual validation is done by the many validation plugins already present.

Lets start by saying a key is a long and must have at least the
value 10:

kdb setmeta spec/example/longkey check/type long

Then we can create a key in a different namespace and see if the spec
plugin applies the meta-data correctly:

kdb set /example/longkey 25
kdb lsmeta /example/longkey

Should now at least print check/type.
By itself, this is useful for documentation of keys.
For example, the application developer says:

kdb setmeta spec/example/longkey description "Do not change"
kdb setmeta spec/example/longkey example 30

The user can retrieve this documentation by:

kdb getmeta /example/longkey description

But we want check/type to be not only a documentation, but also
enforced.

Spec Mount

Using kdb setmeta extensively and always looking out that all plugins
are mounted correctly is error-prone. So instead, one can directly mount
the plugins as specified. For the example above one simply needs:

kdb setmeta spec/example mountpoint example.ecf
kdb spec-mount /example

Now, when we try to modify /example/longkey it will be validated:

kdb set /example/longkey a
> Error (#52) [...] long [not] matched [...] a

Based on the present meta-data, the correct plugins (in this case type
because of the metadata check/type) will be loaded.

We can also create a whole specification file, first mount the
specification and then the mountpoint according the specification, e.g
when we have battery.ini in the folder $(dirname $(kdb file spec))
with following content:

[]
mountpoint = battery.ini
infos/plugins = ini

[level]
check/enum = 'critical', 'low', 'high', 'full'

Then we can use:

# mount the file itself:
kdb mount battery.ini spec/example/battery ni
# make sure all plugins are present (e.g. enum for check/enum):
kdb spec-mount /example/battery

Now lets verify if it worked:

kdb lsmeta /example/battery/level
# we see it has a check/enum
kdb getmeta /example/battery/level check/enum
# now we know allowed values
kdb set /example/battery/level low
# success, low is ok!
kdb set /example/battery/level wrong
# fails, not one of the allowed values!

The main idea of the spec-mount is: search a plugin for every
specification (meta-data) found in the spec-namespace.

General Mount Improvements

In earlier versions kdb mount failed when plugin dependencies were
not satisfied. Now dependencies will automatically be fulfilled, e.g.

kdb mount /etc/modules system/modules line

In earlier versions you would have got an error because of the missing
null plugin. Now it simply adds the needed plugins.

The plugins given in the command-line used to be real plugins. Now also
so called providers are accepted.

To make providers useful we need to actually know which plugin is the
best candidate. To get the information we added a infos/status clause
in the contract. In this clause the plugin developer adds many details
how well the plugin is tested, reviewed, documented, maintained and so
on. Based on this information, the best suited plugin will be chosen.
For example, you now can use:

kdb mount /etc/security/limits.conf system/limits augeas \
    lens=Limits.lns logging

And the best suitable logger will automatically be chosen.

The configuration variable /sw/kdb/current/plugins now allows
us to pass plugin configuration with the same syntax as the plugin
specification passed on the commandline. A subtle difference is that
thus the shell-splitting of arguments is missing, it is not possible to
include whitespaces in the plugin configuration that way.

Now it is also possible to include the same plugin multiple times and
also give them individual names. This feature is essential for
script-based plugins, e.g. you now might add:

kdb mount file.x /example/mountpoint \
    lua#resolver script=resolver.lua \
    lua#storage script=storage.lua

Furthermore, kdb mount now supports recommendations, which can be
enabled with --with-recommends. E.g. supplied to the mount command
using augeas above, comments will automatically transformed to meta-data
to avoid cluttering of the real configuration.

Library Split

Up to now, Elektra consisted only of a single shared library,
libelektra.so. Not all symbols in it were relevant to end users, for
example, some were only needed by plugins. Others were only proposed and
not yet part of the stable API. And finally, other symbols were not needed
in some situations, e.g. the plugins do not need the kdb interface.

Thus, we split libelektra.so, so that only coherent parts are in the
same library:

libelektra-core.so only contains the KeySet data structure and
module loading. Every binary using Elektra should link against it.
libelektra-kdb.so contains the missing KDB symbols. Together with
the core they contain everything declared in kdb.h.
Michael Zehender plans to have multiple variants of libelektra-kdb.so
that use different kinds of concurrency.
Headerfile: <kdb.h>
libelektra-ease.so adds functionality missing in core to make the
life for C programmers easier.
New headerfile: kdbease.h
libelektra-proposal.so adds functionality proposed for core. It
directly uses internal structures of core, thus they always need to
have exactly the same version.
Headerfile: kdbproposal.h

The source code is now better organized by the introduction of a libs
folder. The explanation of every library can be found in
/src/libs/.

The rationale of the library split is documented
here.
Shortly put, it was needed for further evolution and allowing us to grow
and enhance without gettin...

Assets 3

21 Nov 07:46

markus2330

0.8.14

5fd76aa

0.8.14 Release

guid: 519cbfac-6db5-4594-8a38-dec4c84b134f
author: Markus Raab
pubDate: Thu, 19 Nov 2015 17:48:14 +0100

Again we managed to release with many new features and plugins (lua, enum,
list, crypto, csvstorage, conditionals, mathcheck, filecheck, logchange)
many fixes, and especially with a vastly improved polished documentation.

Documentation Initiative

The Documentation Initiative is a huge success and now the documentation
of Elektra is in a state where someone (preferable a linux guru),
never heard of Elektra, still can use Elektra only by reading man pages.

There are now many ways to show a man page:

on github
in the API docu
by using kdb --help or kdb help <command>
by using man kdb

Help system

Ian Donnelly wrote man pages for all the tools delivered with Elektra.
Additionally, nearly all README.md are now also converted to man pages
and also to Doxygen.

Doxygen Filter

Kurt Micheli did an amazing work with a new doxygen filter.
The filter allows all Elektra markdown pages to be also included
in the doxygen documentation. Thus all technical concepts are now
explained in Markdown pages, this filter is essential.

But even more, the filter also includes all man pages written
for the tools, giving a nice html view for them. (In addition to
the markdown rendering on github).

Enjoy the result.

A big thanks to Kurt Micheli!

Further Docu fixes

getenv debugging docu was improved
typo fix: Specify, thanks to Pino Toscano
Design decisions
Definition of Bool, capabilities and
Publish Subscribe (thanks to Daniel Bugl)
Improve iconv docu
usage examples for many plugins
improve README for line plugin (thanks to Ian Donnelly)
add docu about dependencies for some plugins (thanks to Ian Donnelly)
create many new links within the documentation

Simplicity

We shifted our goals
a bit: We want to prefer simplicity to flexibility. Not because we
do no like flexibility, but because we think we achieved enough of it.
Currently (and in future) you can use Elektra:

obviously as primitive key/value storage
with specifications and dozens of plugins driven by it
with code generation
...

But we cut flexibility regarding:

namespaces are only useful for configuration (not for arbitrary key/value)
the semantics of metadata
mounting functionality
error code meanings are fixed, if a resolver detects a conflict, our defined
error must be used
of course ABI, API

Qt-gui 0.0.9

Raffael Pancheri again updated his qt-gui to version 0.0.9 (beta)
with important of fixes and improvements:

Fixes for Qt 5.5
Handling of merge-conflicts improved
Avoid rewriting on merge-conflicts
Allow QML to destroy C++ owned model
Dialog at startup
Reduce memory footprint
add man page

A bit thanks to Raffael Pancheri!

Compatibility

As always, the API and API is fully forward-compatible, i.e. programs
compiled against an older 0.8 versions of Elektra will continue to work.

The behaviour of some plugins, however, changed:

the INI plugin, the section handling was improved.
in the NI plugin, the symbol Ni_GetVersion vanished
in the resolver plugin files of other namespaces which are not
mounted are not resolved anymore

Build System

ENABLE_CXX11 does not exist anymore, it is always on.
We do not care about 199711L compilers anymore, which
makes development easier, without losing any actually
used platform.

Some programs that are only used in-source are not installed
anymore. (by Pino Toscano)

Python and Lua plugins are enabled now in -DPLUGINS=ALL.

Python3 plugin was renamed to python.

Lua Plugin

Manuel Mausz add a lightweight alternative to the python plugin:
the lua plugin.
In a similar way, someone can write scripts, which are executed on every
access to the
key database.

To mount a lua based filter, you can use:

kdb mount file.ini /lua ini lua script=/path/to/lua/lua_filter.lua

Even though it works well, it is classified as technical preview.

Thanks to Manuel Mausz for this plugin!

Cryptography Plugin

In this technical preview, Peter Nirschl
demonstrates how a plugin
can encrypt Elektra's values. In testcases it is already able to do so,
but for the end user an easy way for key derivation is missing.

A big thanks to Peter Nirschl!

INI Plugin

The INI plugin got a near rewrite. Now it handles many situations better,
has many more options and features, including:

preserving the order
using keys as meta-data
many new testcases
fix escaping

Thanks to Thomas Waser for this work!

Mathcheck plugin

This plugin allows you to check and even calculate keys from
other keys using an polish prefix notation.
It supports the typical operations + - / * and
<, <=, ==, !=, =>, >, :=. To mount, check and
calculate values, one would use:

kdb mount mathcheck.dump /example/mathcheck dump mathcheck
kdb setmeta user/example/mathcheck/k check/math "== + a b"
kdb setmeta user/example/mathcheck/k check/math ":= + a b"

For details see the documentation.

Thanks to Thomas Waser for this important plugin!

List Plugin

Currently, Elektra has some limitations on how many plugins can be
added to certain
placement.
Because of the rapidly growing number of plugins, some combinations
are not possible anymore.

This plugin tackles the issue, by delegating the work to an arbitrary
number of subplugins. As a bonus, it works lazily and thus might avoid
the loading of some plugins all together.

Thanks to Thomas Waser for this plugin!

Conditionals

Brings if inside Elektra. It lets you check if some keys have
the values they should have.

kdb mount conditionals.dump /tmount/conditionals conditionals dump
kdb set user/tmount/conditionals/fkey 3.0
kdb set user/tmount/conditionals/hkey hello
kdb setmeta user/tmount/conditionals/key check/condition "(hkey == 'hello') ? (fkey == '3.0')" # success
kdb setmeta user/tmount/conditionals/key check/condition "(hkey == 'hello') ? (fkey == '5.0')" # fail

For details see the documentation.

Again, thanks to Thomas Waser for this plugin!

Csvstorage Plugin

You can now mount csv-files. To mount test.csv simply use:

kdb mount test.csv /csv csvstorage

There are many options, e.g. changing the delimiter, use header
for the key names or predefine how the columns should be named.
For details see the documentation.

Thanks to Thomas Waser!

Filecheck plugin

This plugin lets you validate lineendings, encodings, null, bom and
unprintable characters.

The also new plugin lineendings is already superseded by the filecheck
plugin.

Thanks to Thomas Waser!

Enum plugin

The Enum plugin checks string values of Keys by comparing it against a
list of valid values.

Thanks to Thomas Waser!

Elektrify Machinekit.io

We are proud that Machinekit starts using
Elektra.

Alexander Rössler is digging into all details, and already enhanced
the DBUS Plugin for their needs. DBus now can emit a message for every
changed key.

A big thanks to Alexander Rössler!

Bugfixes

libgetenv did not reinitalized its mutexes on forks
add needSync also in C++ binding
handle removed current working directories (fallback to /)
avoid segfault on missing version keys (when doing kdb rm system/elektra/version)
fix glob plugin + kdb mount with
config/needs usage
fix different handling of strerror_r in Mac OS X (thanks to Daniel Bugl)
do not change the users parentKey in early-error scenarios
do not try to interpret some binary keys as function keys

Other Gems

getenv example: do not link to elektra/elektratools,
thanks to Pino Toscano
fixes in other examples
avoid useless UTF-8 chars and fix typos, thanks to Kurt Micheli
fix kdb check return code (open fail)
pdf now also allows UTF-8 characters if added to
elektraSpecialCharacters.sty, thanks to Kurt Micheli
libgetenv: lookup also used for layers
handle wrong arguments of metals better, thanks to Ian Donnelly
Improvement of error messages in the augeas plugin
kdb set avoids fetching unnecessary namespaces
verbose unmount
logchange: small demonstration plugin to show how to log added,
removed and changed keys
setmeta will use spec as default
libtools: avoid useless getName, add verbosity flag for findBackend
Improve iconv error messages
That mount needs permissions to /etc should now really be obvious
with new error message
many fixes in the template for new plugins

Get It!

You can download the release from
here
and now also here on github

name: elektra-0.8.14.tar.gz
size: 2252008
md5sum: a87cd3845e590bf413959dfd555e3704
sha1: 2360603c347ae3f3a28e827eb9260ff0b9881e46
sha256: af681a38c9c2921b8d249f98ab851c3d51371735471d8a1f833a224c4446fe2e

This release tarball now is also available
signed by me using gpg

already built API-Docu can be found [here](http://doc.libelektra.org/api/0.8.14/html...

Assets 2

Releases: ElektraInitiative/libelektra

0.8.22 Release

What is Elektra?

Highlights

New Logo and Website Theme

INI plugin greatly improved

Notification API and Bindings for Asynchronous I/O

Plugin Processes

Lookup with the Order Preserving Minimal Perfect Hash Map

Other New Features

Documentation

Release 0.8.21

0.8.21 Release

What is Elektra?

Highlights

Fosdem Talk about Elektra in Main Track

CC-licenced Book About Vision of Elektra Published

Maturing of Plugins

Elektra With Encryption

Switch to INI

Other New Features

Documentation

Compatibility

Notes for Maintainer

Notes for Elektra's Developers

Testing

Fixes

Release 0.8.20

0.8.20 Release

What is Elektra?

Highlights

libelektra.org

Haskell and Ruby

Shell Completion

New Plugins

Documentation

Features

Compatibility

Website Release

Highlight

Introduction

The Website

Documentation

Homepage & News

Snippet Sharing

NoScript

Domains

Feedback

Stay tuned!

0.8.19 Release

What is Elektra?

Highlights

More Tutorials

Ruby Bindings

Cleanup of Core

Usability

Plugins

New

Major Enhancements

Development

Compatibility

Package Maintainers

0.8.18 Release

What is Elektra?

Highlights

Crypto Plugin

Open Interception

Resolver

zsh completion

Documentation

Quality

Compatibility

Libtools

Plugins

Proposal

Development

Packaging

Other

Get It!

Stay tuned!