Consfigurator 1.3.0 released

[Sean Whitton]

I am pleased to announce Consfigurator 1.3.0.

News since the last version announced to this list (1.1.0):

- Documentation (<https://spwhitton.name/doc/consfigurator>):

   - New tutorial, "Defining new properties"
     <https://spwhitton.name/doc/consfigurator/tutorial/properties.html>

   - Extract docstrings and use them to generate API references in the
     manual.  It should now be possible to know what properties are
     available for your use without having to read the source of
     properties modules.

   - New manual section "Reader macros" discussing Consfigurator's named
     readtable, including some usage reservations for the sake of future
     extension.

- Properties:

   - APT:PROXY, LXC:USER-CONTAINER and LXC:USER-CONTAINER-FOR are now
     unapplicable.

   - Add FILE:CONTAINS-CONF-UNSPACED, LXC:USER-CONTAINER-STOPPED and
     FILE:EMPTY-DIRECTORY-DOES-NOT-EXIST.

   - APT properties now cache what packages have been explicitly
     installed and removed this deployment.  This should significantly
     speed up many deployments.

   - APT:INSTALLED, APT:INSTALLED-MINIMALLY and APT:REMOVED now only
     execute apt-get(8).  Previously they tried to determine whether the
     packages were already installed or removed by parsing output from
     apt-cache(8), but the implementation sometimes gave the wrong
     answer.

   - APT properties: add ``non-free-firmware`` section to generated
     sources lists.  On Debian bullseye and older this will cause apt
     updates to emit harmless warnings.

   - Fix a bug in FILE:SYMLINKED that meant that with at least GNU
     ln(1), the property would fail to overwrite existing symbolic links
     in some cases.

   - Fix a bug in FILE:DOES-NOT-EXIST which meant that it did nothing if
     only some of the files that should not exist needed to be deleted.

   - When recovering from a failed debootstrap, instead of just
     recursively deleting the target directory, we now call
     EMPTY-REMOTE-DIRECTORY, to empty it, instead.  This is better when
     the target directory is a mount point.

- Readtable:

  - New reader macros ``#~m//`` and ``#~s///`` for shell- and Perl-style
    regular expression matching and replacement.

  - New reader macro ``#>>EOF>>`` which is like ``#>EOF>`` except that
    it skips over the remainder of the current line and its newline.
    This is more like how heredocs work in other languages.

  - Support for indented heredocs, where the indentation of the lines of
    the heredoc is stripped.  This mode is activated by prepending a
    tilde to the heredoc terminator.  For example:

      (foo "argument 1" #>>~EOF>>
	   My line 1.
	   My line 2.
	   EOF)

    The function receives ``"My line 1.\nMy line 2."``

    This is a minor breaking change because heredoc terminators may no
    longer begin with a tilde.

- Miscellaneous:

   - New Emacs major mode, ``consfigurator-lisp-mode``.  This takes care
     of informing Emacs that parts of the buffer are CL-INTERPOL,
     CL-HEREDOC and our ``#~m//`` and ``#~s///`` strings, fixing SLIME's
     C-c C-c in certain cases.

   - PROPAPPLY now signals an error if asked to apply a property that
     has neither ``:APPLY`` nor ``:HOSTATTRS`` subroutines.  This is
     primarily intended to catch cases where the property is defined in
     a ``.lisp`` file that you haven't yet added to your consfig's
     ``.asd`` file.

You can find the source at https://git.spwhitton.name/consfigurator for
browsing online or git cloning.

Releases are made by publishing signed git tags to that repository.  The
tag for this release is named 'v1.3.0', and is signed by me.

On Debian/etc. systems, apt-get install cl-consfigurator/experimental
(In experimental due only to Debian being in a pre-release freeze.)

-8<-

Consfigurator is a system for declarative configuration management using
Common Lisp.  You can use it to configure hosts as root, deploy services
as unprivileged users, build and deploy containers, install operating
systems, produce disc images, and more.  Some key advantages:

 * Apply configuration by transparently starting up another Lisp image
   on the machine to be configured, so that you can use the full power
   of Common Lisp to inspect and control the host.

 * Also define properties of hosts in a more restricted language, that
   of :POSIX properties, to configure machines, containers and user
   accounts where you can't install Lisp.  These properties can be
   applied using just an SSH or serial connection, but they can also be
   applied by remote Lisp images, enabling code reuse.

 * Flexibly chain and nest methods of connecting to hosts.  For example,
   you could have Consfigurator SSH to a host, sudo to root, start up
   Lisp, use the setns(2) system call to enter a Linux container, and
   then deploy a service.  Secrets, and other prerequisite data, are
   properly passed along.

 * Combine declarative semantics for defining hosts and services with a
   multiparadigmatic general-purpose programming language that won't get
   in your way.

Declarative configuration management systems like Consfigurator and
Propellor share a number of goals with projects like the GNU Guix System
and NixOS.  However, tools like Consfigurator and Propellor try to layer
the power of declarative and reproducible configuration semantics on top
of traditional, battle-tested UNIX system administration infrastructure
like distro package managers, package archives and daemon configuration
mechanisms, rather than seeking to replace any of those.  Let's get as
much as we can out of all that existing distro policy-compliant work!

-- 
Sean Whitton
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