[etch-users] Etch 5.0.0 released

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

The big change from the last release (4.1.0) is that etch now supports YAML in place of all of the previous XML files.  So individual files can be configured with config.yml instead of config.xml.  nodes.yml is an alternative to nodes.xml, defaults.yml instead of defaults.xml, etc.  For now all of the XML files are also still supported.  If y’all generally switch your installs to YAML we can consider dropping XML in a future release (6.0 perhaps?)

All of the wiki documentation has been updated:  https://github.com/etch/etch/wiki

Etch has long had a reasonably good integration test suite that fires up an etch server and uses the etch client to test things.  I’ve started to add unit testing of the server which allows finer grained testing.  It has allowed me to find and fix a number of bugs.  Coverage if not complete yet but every little bit helps.

Looks like I also need to back up, since I created a 4.1.0 release but didn’t announce it.  Looks like the big change there from 4.0.1 was moving from Rails 3 to Rails 4.  I also changed the column in the database that is used to store the configuration for a given file on a particular client to a compressed long blob so that it can hold configuration that is larger than 64k.

Thanks a bunch to Pat O’Brien for his contributions and for pushing me to get this released.