[etch-users] Etch 3.15.0 released

[Jason H. <jh...@ap...>]

The most significant change in this release is that the client now stores history logs as individual files rather than in RCS.  RCS resulted in a very cumbersome UI for viewing the history logs, making it unlikely the history log would be used.  Individual files allows for easy viewing and inspection using standard Unix tools like ls, diff, grep, etc.  History logs in the old RCS format are converted automatically to the new format.

Add any exception message to the message that is reported to the etch server.  Otherwise we just report a non-zero status with no message, which is difficult to debug.  We were printing the exception message to stderr, but most users run etch in a cron job that sends stderr to /dev/null.  Change based on feedback from Kenneth Williams.

Added a rake task for cleaning old entries out of the database per suggestion from Kenneth Williams.  Also added a link in the web UI to delete a client.

I removed the auto-update cron jobs from the RPM and Solaris packages.  They were a bit of a holdover from the way we run things in our environment, but it would be very unusual for publicly-released software to operate that way.  We'll leave it up to end users to auto-update etch appropriately for their environment.

I'm also slightly changing the version numbering in this release to major.minor.patch.  Previously I was using major.minor.  I'm trying to make etch available via various packaging systems to simplify installation (gems, MacPorts, etc.) and some of those expect the major.minor.patch format.  Thus the jump from 3.13 to 3.15.0.

Jason