[Fab-user] [ANN] Fabric 1.3 released, with dependency changes; bugfix releases too

[Jeff Forcier]

Hi all,

A bunch of news today:

* Fabric 1.3 out
* Bugfix releases out
* Fabric 1.3 dependency change
* PyCrypto 2.4 seems broken under setuptools/easy_install
* Fabric 0.9.x and 1.0.x EOL'd.
* We now have a basic roadmap


## Fab 1.3 and bugfix releases

Fabric 1.3 is out:

    http://docs.fabfile.org/en/1.3.0/changelog.html

The new features in 1.3 are parallel execution and the execute()
function -- see the changelog for details -- and it has the usual
bugfixes, also available for older versions:

    * http://docs.fabfile.org/en/1.0.5/changelog.html
    * http://docs.fabfile.org/en/1.1.5/changelog.html
    * http://docs.fabfile.org/en/1.2.3/changelog.html

Apologies for the delay in release -- we were trying to find a
resolution to the next section.


## Dependency changes

Fab 1.3 depends on a new public fork of Paramiko,
controlled/registered by us, named "ssh" and available on PyPI:

    http://pypi.python.org/pypi/ssh/

At present, it's Paramiko 1.7.7.1 with a new name and one bugfix to
support Fabric 1.3's parallel feature. However, it will take on a life
of its own and start to receive updates listed in ticket #275:

    https://github.com/fabric/fabric/issues/275

This should not cause serious install problems, but we'll be keeping
an eye out -- please report any issues. See also the next section.

All versions of Fabric below 1.3.0, including today's bugfixes, still
require 'paramiko', and this is not currently slated to change.


## PyCrypto 2.4

As luck would have it, Crypto put out a new release yesterday, and it
does not appear to be installable via `setup.py install` or
`easy_install` on some platforms. Specifically, a fatal error about
"src/config.h: No such file or directory" occurs.

We have updated all of the latest Fabric releases' setup.py files to
require "pycrypto >= 1.9, < 2.4", which should prevent them from
triggering this. (Technically, Fabric 1.3.0 now only depends on 'ssh',
but we have updated ssh's setup.py in the same way.)

If you run into this problem (e.g. on an older Fabric such as 1.2.2 or
1.0.4), manually installing PyCrypto 2.3 (via pip/easy_install/etc)
prior to installing Fabric is the suggested workaround.


## Closing the support window on 0.9.x, 1.0.x

We quietly dropped support for Fabric 0.9.x after 1.1 came out, but
it's official now: 0.9.x is end-of-lifed and will receive no support
or bugfixes.

Furthermore, Fabric 1.0.5 is the last 1.0.x release. We emphasize
backwards compatibility; 1.0.x fabfiles should run just fine,
unmodified, under Fabric 1.1 or 1.2 (and under 1.3 too, dependency
change notwithstanding.) Given this practice, it's not worth the
overhead to keep 4+ release lines open.

Moving forwards, the plan is to keep the latest release and its 2
previous releases open for business, so Fab 1.4 will see 1.1 EOL'd,
etc.


## Roadmap

We now have a basic roadmap up explaining our development direction
(intentionally vague -- no promises!):

    http://docs.fabfile.org/en/latest/roadmap.html

Note the /en/latest/ -- newer released versions may have their own
copy of this file, but only the 'latest' one will be accurate. We'll
move this to a static website very soon, too.


Thanks for reading!

Regards,
Jeff

-- 
Jeff Forcier
Unix sysadmin; Python/Ruby engineer
http://bitprophet.org