Bob 0.22 Release Notes

Changes made since Bob 0.21.0 include the following.

New features

• A mini cheat sheet with the most common used commands, options and keywords was added to the documentation.

• Added support for projects that use PowerShell on MSYS2.

• Added a get-tool-env string function. It queries defined variables of a tool. The tool only needs to be defined and is not required to be actually used by the recipe. An optional default value can be passed that will be used if the variable is not defined in the tool. Otherwise undefined variables will fail the parsing. (#486).

Bob build/dev

• Added the --no-attic build option to fail the build instead of moving unswitchable SCMs to attic.

• Git checkouts are moved to the attic if they are in a detached HEAD state and the current commit does not match the old checkout state. This could happen if commits are made in detached HEAD state (i.e. when not being on a branch). While the commit(s) would still be available through the git reflog, it is not guaranteed that they are not expunged eventually.

• Improved git workflow with commits and branches.

  Bob gained additional support for working with recipes, where a commit and a branch is specified. Historically Bob simply gave priority to the commit or tag and moved to a detached HEAD state. Now, controlled under the gitCommitOnBranch policy, Bob will check if the commit is on the specified branch or fail the build otherwise. Additionally the branch is checked out at precisely the given commit. This avoids the detached HEAD state.

• Bob gained the checkoutUpdateIf recipe keyword to run selected checkoutScript in build-only mode.

  By default no checkout scripts are run when building with --build-only. Some use cases practically require the checkoutScript to be always run, through. A typical example are code generators that generate sources from some high level description. These generators must be run every time when the user has changed the input. A recipe or class can explicitly opt in to run their checkoutScript also in build-only mode to cover such a use case.

• The output of fingerprint scripts is now optionally visible just like for normal steps at higher verbosity levels (#478).

• Audit failures are always shown even if successful audit actions are not visible on the current verbosity level (#472).

Bob Jenkins

• Bob gained support for Jenkins running on native Windows. Previously there was only limited support for Windows Jenkins builds with MSYS2. The additional support requires that the same version of Bob that configures the Jenkins master needs to be installed on all build nodes.

• Added a --host-platform option. It allows for a distinction between native Windows and MSYS2. By default, the Jenkins platform is assumed to be the same as where Bob is executed. Because the host platform is now an enumeration, the existing -w option is deprecated. It will still be understood and existing projects will keep on working too.

• Improved handling of the --force option. Previously the “force” switch only enabled overwriting existing jobs if Bob wanted to create a new one. Now the “force” switch will unconditionally overwrite all jobs. With that, it is now possible to discard all manual changes even if Bob does not need to update the jobs.

• Bob Jenkins gained the --user and --password options. They provide an alternative to specify the credentials instead of storing them in the Jenkins alias.

• Added the shared.quota extended option. It allows to limit the amount of data stored in the shared location. It works the same way as the local configuration.

Bob status

• Bob now avoids tags to be shown as unpushed.

  It’s not uncommon to have tags which do not belong to a branch. The old behavior of the status command was to show them as ‘unpushed’ even if they exist as a remote tag and nothing was changed locally. Now all tags are excluded from the ‘unpushed’ status output to avoid this. (#494)

Plugins

• Added support for schema changes in bob.utils.updateDictRecursive() by allowing to change the type of values in dictionaries. Usually this is fine and may save plugins that use the bob.input.PluginSetting class from doing schema normalization.

• Added the bob.input.Package.getPluginStates() and bob.input.Recipe.getPluginProperties() methods to make this information available to all plugins.

Backwards incompatible changes

• Removed support for Python 3.5.

  Python 3.5 has reached end-of-life long ago. We did not build packages for this version since a long time but it was still possible to use Bob with it. Note that compatibility is still kept for Python 3.6 even though it has reached EOL too. Ubuntu 18.04LTS (bionic) is still shipping this version and will be supported until April 2023.

• Fail if a given trivial package path does not match. Previously Bob would just ignore the path and do nothing. Note that more complex package queries that involve predicates or wildcards and that do not produce a match will not cause an error. The exact behaviour can be further tweaked by the global --query bob option that recognizes the following policies:

  nullset

  Empty sets of packages are considered a regular result and never treated as an error. This includes trivial path location steps where exact package names do not match.

  nullglob

  Return an empty set of packages if the query involves wildcard name matches and/or predicates. Otherwise, that is if only direct name matches are used, an error is raised if a package name in the path does not match. This is the default.

  nullfail

  An empty set of packages is always treated as an error.

  The old behaviour - nullset - has been replaced by the new nullglob default. While it may break existing setups, the new default is much closer to the behaviour regular shells. If required, the policy may be overridden on the command line or the user configuration files (see ui.queryMode).

Bug fixes

• Fixed failing sandbox mounts in conjunction with the checkoutDep flag (#479)

• Fixed symlink handling of the import SCM on Windows. When creating symlinks on Windows the target type must be known in advance. To work around these problems the import SCM will now copy everything except symlinks first and later only the symlinks.

• Fixed a bug when generation of the audit trail was not retried if it failed for checkout steps.

• Added a workaround for Bash on Windows when WSL is enabled but no distribution is installed. Previously Bash could not be executed even though the MSYS2 version was in %PATH%.

• Fixed a crash in IfExpressions where a function call and a literal were compared, e.g.: foo() == "bar".

• Fixed out of tree builds of projects that use the import SCM. (#489).

• Rectified schema validation of set properties of scmOverride. (#497)

• Fixed a crash of the Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code project generators with packages that have a host executable file but has no checkout step. (#498)