[Squashfs-announce] [ANNOUNCE] libsquashfs & squashfs-tools-ng 0.9 are released

[David O. <go...@in...>]

Hi,

squashfs-tools-ng 0.9 is released.


Tarball:     https://infraroot.at/pub/squashfs/squashfs-tools-ng-0.9.tar.xz
Signature:   https://infraroot.at/pub/squashfs/squashfs-tools-ng-0.9.tar.xz.asc
Signed tag:  https://github.com/AgentD/squashfs-tools-ng.git v0.9

Pre-compiled Windows binaries, built using a MinGW cross toolchain,
are available here:

https://infraroot.at/pub/squashfs/windows/squashfs-tools-ng-0.9-mingw32.zip
https://infraroot.at/pub/squashfs/windows/squashfs-tools-ng-0.9-mingw32.zip.asc

https://infraroot.at/pub/squashfs/windows/squashfs-tools-ng-0.9-mingw64.zip
https://infraroot.at/pub/squashfs/windows/squashfs-tools-ng-0.9-mingw32.zip.asc


After more time than anticipated and with a backlog of commits that kept
piling up, I decided to try and reach a stable state which is now released as
version 0.9. Hopefully be the last release before version 1.0.

This version contains mainly internal & API cleanups for libsquashfs, as well
as some performance improvements. Improvements in automated testing/CI has
should have also resolved some build issues on some platforms (e.g. macOS).

The intention is to, from now on focus primarily on cleanup, testing and
improving stability, performance and avoid risky new features until 1.0,
which is supposed to freeze both the command line interface of the tooling
as well as the API/ABI of libsquashfs.

It would have been tempting to call this an RC1, but keeping the major version
at 0 still leaves the possibility of making API changes if necessary,
especially to allow for "hey, why does the sqfs_frobulator_t not do foo here
instead" kind of feedback, as my own current state could be described
as "betriebsblind".


Changes from 0.8 to 0.9:

Features:
 - Support parsing size argument with SI suffix.
 - More through documentation on the on-disk format.
 - A few demo programs that make use of `libsquashfs`.
 - Lots of performance improvements.

Changed/Removed:
 - Various API cleanups before reaching 1.0.0
 - For better compatibility, sqfs2tar appends `/` to directory names.

Fixed:
 - Build issues for Linux glibc platforms (i.e. a build error on GNU/Hurd).
 - Directory index accounting.
 - Memory leak in hard link detection code.
 - Broken iteration over directory children in sqfsdiff.
 - Data reader returning -1 instead of an error code.
 - Size accounting for sparse files in tar parsing code.
 - Stricter verification of the compressor configuration.
 - Broken builds with older liblz4 and zstd versions (e.g. on Ubuntu Xenial).
 - Various build issues on MacOS.


Regards,

David