Bob 0.15 Release Notes

Changes made since Bob 0.14.0 include the following.

Prerequisites

Bob requires Python 3.5 or later starting with 0.15.

New features

Recipes

  • Added the sslVerify SCM attribute to git, svn and url SCMs.

    The boolean attribute controls whether to verify the SSL certificate when fetching. It defaults to true but might be set to false to ignore certificate problems. The default for git is defined by the secureSSL policy.

  • Introduced the netAccess provideTools property.

    Starting with the introduction of the offlineBuild policy the network access is usually restricted during build and package steps. There might be tools that need network access and are used during these steps, though. This can be configured with the {build,package}NetAccess recipe properties but if the recipe does not know the exact tool it might not want to set these properties unconditionally.

    The main use case are proprietary compilers that need to talk to a license server. The recipe should not bother which compiler is used exactly.

  • provideTools gained the environment property.

    Certain tools (e.g. the C-compiler) and their associated environment variables (CC, LD, …) are related to each other and must be defined and used together. Traditionally they are provided more or less independently of each other by a tools recipe with provideTools and provideVars. This has several drawbacks:

    • Not all recipes that define the same tool (e.g. the compiler) are providing the same set of environment variables.

    • Different tools might provide the same variables.

    By defining the environment variables with the tool their value can be picked up where it is actually used. This does not pollute the environment with variables that are only used in conjunction with the tool and are not used elsewhere.

    To prevent ambiguities each variable must only be defined by one tool. The parsing will fail if two tools are used in the same recipe that define the same variable. The reason is that Bob assumes that tools are independent of each other and no particular order is defined among them.

  • Host fingerprint support.

    The fingerprint feature is used to track all dependencies of the recipes to the host environment in a generic manner. This is done by defining small scripts in the recipes that are invoked when the fingerprint is required. The output of these scripts is then taken as fingerprint.

    Fingerprints may range from the host C-compiler up to some libraries that are used by certain packages from the host. Because such external dependencies limit the exchange of artifacts between hosts the fingerprint is attached to binary artifacts to prevent unintended sharing between incompatible systems.

    The fingerprints are also used to detect relevant changes of the host environment. A package is always rebuilt if the fingerprint changes. The fingerprint is thus like an external build trigger. There are two major cases why Bob wants to rebuild when the fingerprint changes:

    • The package was built inside the sandbox and now the user builds outside of the sandbox (or vice versa).

    • The package was built without sandbox and the fingerprint changes. Bob has to assume that the external dependency has changed its state and thus an incremental rebuild is needed.

    If a package is not relocatable the workspace path is also some kind of host dependency. Bob treats the installation path of these tools as an additional fingerprint. This enables safe exchange of such artifacts that were previously only up-/downloaded when building inside a sandbox. This is only done if the allRelocatable policy is set to the new behaviour, though.

    See fingerprintScript[{Bash,Pwsh}] and provideTools for further details.

  • Allow local files with the “url” SCM.

    If the URL starts with /, it is treated as a local file and is just copied with cp instead of downloaded using curl. This makes it possible to easily build from tarballs in a sandbox that has no network access and no curl command.

  • Add BOB_RECIPE_NAME and BOB_PACKAGE_NAME built-in variables

    These variables are set internally by Bob and can be consumed by a recipe or class to know which recipe/package is built. For example it might be used to name the artifact (think rpm/deb/ipkg pacakge) like the recipe.

User configuration (default.yaml)

  • Added require keyword.

    User configuration files may also require sometimes specific files to be included. Therefore the require keyword is introduced. The require keyword throws an error for missing files. Other than that it behaves just like the existing include keyword.

    See User configuration (default.yaml).

  • Added the sslVerify http archive backend attribute.

    The boolean attribute controls whether to verify the SSL certificate when fetching/uploading to/from HTTPS servers. The default depends on the secureSSL policy. The new behavior is to default to true but it might be set to false to ignore certificate problems.

Bob build / bob dev

  • Gained parallel build support.

    If requested by -j a number of jobs can run simultaneously. Any checkout/build/package step that needs to be executed are counted as a job. Downloads and uploads of binary artifacts are separate jobs too. If a job fails the other currently running jobs are still finished before Bob returns. No new jobs are scheduled, though, unless the -k option is given.

    If the -j option is given without an argument, Bob will run as many jobs as there are processors on the machine.

  • Added the --no-link-deps option.

    Creating links to dependencies confuses indexers like OpenGrok. This switch is there to disable the creation of linked dependencies.

Bob clean

The clean command has been extend to develop mode and attic directories. It will now purge unused workspace directories from develop mode builds too. If requested, it also removes attic directories.

At the same time the default is changed to ‘develop’ mode. This streamlines the behaviour with the other commands in Bob that also work in ‘develop’ mode by default. Together with the added --(no-)sandbox options it’s configuration is finally consistent with the other commands.

If the user removes source workspaces (-s or --attic options) Bob will now check the SCMs in these directories for unsaved changes. The directory will only be deleted if no changes are found.

Attic directories are tracked starting with Bob 0.15. Any attic directories that were created with an older version of Bob in a project are not known and will not be cleaned. Bob will print a warning in case the project was created with an older version and attic directories should be cleaned.

Bob Jenkins

  • Added the jobs.update option

    Updating a Jenkins job is costly. On projects with hundreds of jobs the overhead can be significant when just the description or audit trail information is updated but the job is not actually scheduled. The ‘jobs.update’ option adds a knob to control the update behaviour and provide lazy update methods.

Bob status

  • Flag directories that will move to the attic or will be created.

    If the recipe is changed for a SCM checkout it will be moved to the attic when the checkout is run the next time. Bob now flags the directory as A (as in “attic”) so that the user knows about the stale state. Likewise the N flag shows checkouts that do not exist in the workspace yet but will be created on the next run.

  • Print override status as yaml.

    The scmOverrides configuration is done in a yaml file. Print the active overrides in the same format for consistency.

  • The package argument is now optional.

    If no package is given then all known checkouts are scanned for changes. This will only give meaningful results if the project was created with Bob 0.15, though, because older versions of Bob did not store enough information about the project.

  • Added an --attic switch to display information about the attic directories.

    The switch is orthogonal to the package argument. If a package is selected then all attic directories of this package are displayed. Otherwise all known attic directories are scanned.

  • For git repositories bob status will now check all unpushed commits.

    This does not only check local branches for unpushed commits but all refs. Therefore stash, detached HEAD, etc. are checked as well.

  • Improved output verbosity and streamlined its selection.

    The --show-clean was added to explicitly show unchanged checkouts. These are now hidden by default. The behaviour of the -v and --show-clean options has been made more consistent. See Verbosity of the bob status manpage.

  • The --sandbox / --no-sandbox options were added.

Bob query-meta, query-scm, query-recipe

  • The --sandbox / --no-sandbox options were added.

Changed behaviour

Backwards compatible policies

  • Added mergeEnvironment policy.

    The environment and privateEnvironment sections of the recipes and classes it inherits from are merged when the packages are calculated. Traditionally this was done on a key-by-key basis without variable substitution. Keys from the recipe or an inherited class would simply shadow keys from later inherited classes. This had the effect that the definitions of later inherited classes were lost.

    The new behavior is to make all environment keys eligible to variable substitution. The definitions of the recipe has the highest precedence (i.e. it is substituted last). Declarations of classes are substituted in their inheritance order, that is, the last inherited class has the highest precedence.

    See mergeEnvironment for more details.

  • Added the secureSSL policy.

    Due to historical reasons Bob did not check for SSL certificate errors everywhere. While most parts were already secure the git SCM and HTTPS archive backend were still insecure by default. This is rectified by the secureSSL policy where the new behavior is to always check the certificate.

Other behavioural changes

  • bob jenkins defaults to secure SSL connections.

    Always use secure SSL connections by default. If the user still needs to connect to insecure HTTPS servers the --no-ssl-verify option may be used.

  • The default project directory name of the built-in bob project generators have been shortened.

    By default the package path was used for the project directory. If the built package was deep in the hierarchy this could lead to excessively long path names. Instead Bob now uses the project name (which defaults to the package name) as directory name.

    This could theoretically create clashes if different variants of a recipe are built simultaneously. But the user can handle that by the --destination option rather than creating excessively long paths by default.

  • Fixed the sandboxInvariant policy.

    Setting the sandboxInvariant policy to the new behaviour had exactly the opposite effect as intended. It caused artifacts of sandbox and non-sandbox builds to be always incompatible to each other. This has been rectified.

  • On git checkouts only tags that are on branches are cloned by default. Previously all tags have been cloned. This is done to prevent bob status from flagging a repository as having unpushed commits because orphaned tags are not referenced from remote heads. Note that git does not fetch such tags anyway on a git pull or git fetch. The user has to fetch orphaned tags explicitly either by naming them on the command line or with the --tags option. If the recipe requests such a tag to be checked out then it will still be fetched explicitly by Bob.

Backwards incompatible changes

  • Recipes cannot define variables starting with BOB_

    Variable names starting with BOB_ have historically been used by Bob all over the place. This release added even some more (BOB_RECIPE_NAME, BOB_PACKAGE_NAME). To prevent accidential breakage of recipes by future versions of Bob that define additional variables, Bob will reject recipes that define variables in this name space. This may break existing recipes but it cannot be guaranteed that they will work with future versions either.

  • The default mode of the bob clean command was changed from release mode to develop mode. This makes its behaviour consistent with all other Bob commands.

  • The String functions and bob.input.PluginState APIs have changed.

    Due to the redesigned package calculation it is not possible to pass the bob.input.Tool or bob.input.Package objects to the plugins anymore that use bob.input.PluginState. Plugins requiring the old API still work but the tools and package arguments are filled with empty values.

    Similarly the string functions lost the tools parameter. The sandbox parameter was converted to a plain bool.

    This changes the behaviour and projects relying on the removed parameters will have to be refactored. But at least the parsing should not crash. A warning is displayed for every usage of a deprecated API.

Performance improvements

  • Refactored package calculation.

    The internal logic of the package calculation was optiomized. The parsing time and memory footptrint are improved by up to an order of magnitude.

  • bob graph scales much better on large package graphs.