[virt-tools-list] [ANNOUNCE] libguestfs 1.8.0 - tools for accessing and modifying VM disk images

[Richard W.M. Jones]

We are pleased to announce the next stable release of libguestfs,
tools and a library for accessing, creating and modifying the contents
of virtual machines and disk images.

Home page: http://libguestfs.org/

Binary packages for:
   Fedora: http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/packageinfo?packageID=8391
   Debian: http://libguestfs.org/download/binaries/debian-packages/
   Ubuntu: http://libguestfs.org/download/binaries/ubuntu-packages/
   RHEL 6: http://people.redhat.com/~rjones/rhel6.1-libguestfs-preview/ (soon)

Here are the release notes (also at http://libguestfs.org/RELEASE-NOTES.txt )

Release notes for libguestfs 1.8.0
----------------------------------

These release notes only cover the differences from the previous
stable/dev branch split (1.6.0).  For detailed changelogs, please see
the git repository, or the ChangeLog file distributed in the tarball.

New features

 - Support and packages for Debian and Ubuntu.

 - Daily builds from git repository on Debian and Ubuntu to reduce risk
   of regressions.

 - Port to ArchLinux 'pacman' (thanks Thomas S Hatch).

 - The following tools have been rewritten in C (originally in Perl):

     . virt-cat
     . virt-df
     . virt-inspector
     . virt-ls
     . virt-rescue

 - Some C tools support encrypted guests automatically.  This is
   supported in: guestfish, guestmount, virt-cat, virt-inspector,
   virt-ls.

 - New tool virt-filesystems (in C) which is a replacement for
   virt-list-filesystems and virt-list-partitions, and has a superset
   of the functionality of those tools.

 - guestfish, guestmount and the C tools use unified command line option
   parsing, so they support many common options such as '-a disk.img',
   '-d libvirt-domain', '-x', '-v'.  The old command line option
   parsing is preserved for compatibility in scripts etc.

 - guestfish no longer has any dependencies on Perl

 - New man pages containing programming examples: guestfs-examples(3) (C/C++),
   guestfs-ocaml(3), guestfs-python(3), guestfs-ruby(3).

 - Trace mode prints return values from API functions.

 - virt-inspector can list applications installed in Windows guests, along
   with a great deal of information about those applications.

 - Add support for inspecting: Linux Mint, Mandriva, FreeBSD.

 - guestfish --rw option (with no effect currently) to make potentially
   dangerous write access explicit.

 - guestfish --listen --csh for compatibility with csh, tcsh (thanks
   Eric Blake).

 - The first upstream version that introduced each API function is now
   documented in guestfs(3).

 - guestfs_last_errno allows you to retrieve the errno from the
   daemon, correctly translated to the local operating system.

 - Functions can now have optional parameters.

 - Progress bars and progress notifications can now happen for upload
   commands.

 - Appliance builder more careful about not leaving temporary files
   around in /tmp.

 - getfattr/setfattr commands added to virt-rescue.

 - ROADMAP file covers roadmap and goals for future releases.

Security

 - New SECURITY section in guestfs(3) API documentation.

 - virt-inspector no longer runs any guest commands.

 - Inspection code is more careful about avoiding very large files
   from guests which might previously have caused a denial of service.

 - FUSE calls into guestmount are now traced when using guestmount -x.

New APIs

 - add-domain
 - add-drive-opts
 - getxattr
 - inspect-get-hostname
 - inspect-get-package-format
 - inspect-get-package-management
 - inspect-get-roots
 - inspect-list-applications
 - lgetxattr
 - mkfs-opts

Internals

 - C programs now only link precisely with the libraries that they use.

 - PCRE, libmagic, hivex and libvirt libraries are now completely
   optional for building.

 - Multiple memory leaks and file descriptor leaks fixed.

 - Add a POD wrapper to unify generation of man pages and HTML files
   across all programs.

 - Source includes phony images of Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu and
   Windows guests.

 - Ruby bindings have 'make install' rule.

 - <guestfs.h> is now a single file.

 - <guestfs.h> does not require XDR headers.

 - ocaml xml-light library is no longer required to build (thanks
   Maxim Koltsov).

 - ./configure --disable-[...] for each language binding (thanks
   Maxim Koltsov).

 - Old ocaml-viewer program removed (use guestfs-browser instead).

 - New C API test type 'InitScratchFS' makes the tests run a little
   more quickly.

 - Excluded packages in the appliance are now listed in a separate
   file appliance/excludelist.in, and can be customized per-distro.

Bugs fixed

 - 663407 readlink and readlinklist returns /sysroot/ in some paths
 - 661280 virt-rescue: panic when shutting down: "/sbin/reboot: No such file or directory"
 - 657499 checksum: wrong check sum type causes umount to fail
 - 655554 Whole disk paths are not made canonical by virt-inspector
 - 654638 openssl updated to 1.0.0b libguestfs depends on exact file names
 - 652796 ruby bindings not installed by 'make install', hence omitted from the binary distribution


-- 
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
virt-top is 'top' for virtual machines.  Tiny program with many
powerful monitoring features, net stats, disk stats, logging, etc.
http://et.redhat.com/~rjones/virt-top