[ClusterLabs] Announcing crmsh stable release 2.1.4 (plus history guide etc.)

[Kristoffer Grönlund]

Hi everyone,

Today we are proud to announce the release of `crmsh` version 2.1.4!
2.1.4 is a minor bug fix release with no major issues, so users
already running 2.1.3 are mostly fine. Instead, the main reason
for releasing 2.1.4 is as an excuse to talk about some other things
that are happening with crmsh!

The details for this release are available below.

History Guide
~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Dejan has written a guide to using the crmsh history
command. For those who are unfamiliar with the history explorer or
want to know more about how to use it, this guide is a great
introduction to what it does and how to use it.

History is not a new crmsh feature, but, as we failed to
advertise it and nothing works without proper marketing, it
probably hasn't seen a very wide use. That's surely a pity and we
hope that this gentle history guide is going to help. 

So, if you use crmsh and if you need help troubleshooting
clusters (I surely do!), take a look here:

http://crmsh.github.io/history-guide/

FYI, the comprehensive crmsh help also has a short description of
the feature:

crm history help

Goes without saying: all commands are described too.

If you don't use crmsh, you'll still find a lot of useful
information in the guide, so don't skip it.

Hawk Presentation
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I presented Hawk [1] and the History Explorer interface which
builds upon the crmsh history feature at openSUSE conf in The Hague
earlier this month. The video of that presentation is online here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mngfxzXkFLw

[1]: https://github.com/ClusterLabs/hawk


2.2.0 Development News
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

While 2.1.4 is the latest stable release, I am also working on releasing
2.2.0 which will come with a bunch of new features. I'm still working
on some of these and not everything is in the repository yet, so
2.2.0 is probably at least a month or so away still. I was perhaps
a bit optimistic when I tagged RC1 back in October last year. ;)

However, right now I'd like to focus on one thing that is already in
2.2.0 and which is available if you use the development packages from
OBS: command shorthands. This makes crmsh a lot more convenient to use
from the command line. Basically, you can use any unambiguous subset
of a command name to refer to that command, and crmsh will figure out
what you mean. This may sound confusing, so an example will help with
explaining what I mean:

This is one way of showing the current cluster configuration:

crm configure show

However, now you can shorten this to the following:

crm cfg show

Other examples of shorthand are "crm rsc stop r1" or "crm st"
for status. And of course, tab completion in bash still works for
the shorthand variants.

The examples used here are not comprehensive. crmsh is pretty clever
at figuring out which command was intended. Download the development
release and try it out!

2.1.4 Details
~~~~~~~~~~~~~

For a complete list of changes since the previous version, please
refer to the changelog:

* https://github.com/ClusterLabs/crmsh/blob/2.1.4/ChangeLog

Packages for several popular Linux distributions can be downloaded
from the Stable repository at the OBS:

* http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/network:/ha-clustering:/Stable/

Archives of the tagged release:

* https://github.com/ClusterLabs/crmsh/archive/2.1.4.tar.gz
* https://github.com/ClusterLabs/crmsh/archive/2.1.4.zip

Changes since the previous release:

- Medium: hb_report: use faster zypper interface if available
- medium: ui_configure: Wait for DC when removing running resource
- low: schema: Don't leak PacemakerError exceptions (#93)
- parse: Don't require trailing colon in tag definitions
- medium: utils: Allow 1/0 as boolean values for parameters

Thank you,

Kristoffer and Dejan

-- 
// Kristoffer Grönlund
// kgronlund at suse.com