Github

hENC version 3 released

/ bronto / Leave a comment

github-logo Today I am releasing the version 3 of hENC, the radically simple hierarchical External Node Classifier (ENC) for CFEngine (version 2 was released at the end of May and added support for data containers).

This version adds new features and bug fixes, namely:

  • implemented !COMMANDS: a ! primitive is added to specify commands; three commands exist currenty: !RESET_ACTIVE_CLASSES to make hENC forget about any class that was activated up to that point, !RESET_CANCELLED_CLASSES ditto for cancelled classes, and !RESET_ALL_CLASSES that makes hENC forget about any class that was activated or cancelled;
  • fixed enc.cf, so that it is possible to run the henc module more than once during the same agent run;
  • added a Changelog;
  • improved tests: tests have been added for the new features and the whole test suite has been improved to support the TAP protocol; for example, it’s now it’s possible to use the prove utility to verify if hENC works correctly on your system before trying the installation.

See the README and Changelog for more information.

hENC now on github

/ bronto / Leave a comment

github-logo hENC is a radically simple external node classificator for CFEngine that I developed as part of my work in Opera starting from 2013. To my surprise and despite its simplicity, it was so much appreciated by the community that I was encouraged to present it at FOSDEM and Configuration Management Camp in 2014, which I did with much to my satisfaction.

This year I presented an updated version of the same talk at the Software conference in Oslo and I was asked if the code was open source and available. It wasn’t yet, and the main reason was that I knew it would take an effort to generalize it, to abstract it from our environment and make it suitable to be used anywhere. And it did: if you look at the history it took 16 days and 24 commits before I was happy enough with the result to publish it. But I finally did and it’s now available on github. Now it’s your turn.

You can do a lot to help these contribution coming. Give them a chance. If they seem to solve your problem, try them; if they actually help you, contribute to them if you have a chance; if you don’t have a chance to contribute you can at least promote them.

The CFEngine community is rather small and doesn’t have the large ecosystem of tools that other CM communities can boast about. Despite that, pearls like EvolveThinking’s EFL, Delta Reporting and Delta Hardening or Normation’s NCF (to name only a very few!) are there: help them grow, help more tools come, support developers to keep up the good work, share and encourage sharing, contribute back if you can. More than anything else, please let’s stop reinventing the wheel every time and become good at sharing.

If you do, everybody wins: you win because you get more tools, and we win because we see that our contributions are useful and appreciated.

Thanks in advance
-- bronto

New home for my code, new release

/ bronto / Leave a comment

Perl (onion)During the past years I’ve published a few Perl modules of mine to CPAN. Nothing big, nothing special, just some small, simple modules that I published in the hope that they would be useful to more people than just me. That code lived, or rather slept, in my hard disk and was not shared anywhere than in CPAN.

At the end of May, a bug was opened against the Net::LDAP::Express module and I decided it was time to bring that code to year 2014. Now, and since a few days ago, you can find the code of all my modules in github. With the code shared on github I was able to share a fix, have it tested by the person who submitted the bug, and confirm the bug was solved. Since one hour ago, the bugfix release 0.12 of Net::LDAP::Express is available on CPAN (on metaCPAN only for now, will hit all the archives in the next few hours).

You are welcome to clone the code from github, fork, branch, open pull requests… Just share the code, make it better, help people, and don’t forget to have fun in the process!