[Fab-user] [ANN] Fabric 1.4 out! (plus bugfix releases, and the usual News)

[Jeff Forcier]

Hi all! First feature release of 2012. Let's just skip the obligatory
stupid apocalypse joke and move right along.


## Fabric 1.4

Happy to announce that Fabric 1.4 is out and on PyPI, after a too-long
wait. It's a sobering reminder that the temptation to stuff a lot of
related changes into one release needs to be strongly resisted! (For
example, SSH agent forwarding has been stable since late last year...)

On the plus side, it contains many long-awaited features: SSH agent
forwarding, SSH configuration file support, network connection
retries/timeouts, execute() return values, and more.

The full changelog can be found here:
http://docs.fabfile.org/en/1.4.0/changelog.html . Everything above
"Fabric 1.3.4" is included in this release. (P.S. I have [possibly
over-engineered] ideas about how to add a release-oriented view back
to the changelog; we'll see how that goes...)


## Bugfixes

I have also cut bugfixes for 1.1 through 1.3, though most contain only
one or two fixes. Specifically: 1.1.8, 1.2.6 and 1.3.5. And speaking
of bugfix releases...


## End-of-life (EOL) for older support branches

It's time to retire old bugfix lines; our strong commitment to
backwards compatibility should mean upgrading is painless or nearly
so, and it is getting taxing keeping old release lines active.

>From here on we're going to experiment with a smaller support window:
current stable release (so right now, that's 1.4) plus its immediate
predecessor (so 1.3). 1.1 and 1.2 are now EOL'd, and when 1.5 comes
out, 1.3 will become EOL'd, and so forth.


## Where next?

I've updated the roadmap: http://docs.fabfile.org/en/latest/roadmap.html

Some project infrastructure needs work, so I will be focusing on that
stuff in tandem with 1.5 -- which should come out much quicker than
1.4, my day job and personal life willing. 1.5 will focus mostly on
logging and UI improvements, plus a couple network issues punted from
1.4.


Big thanks as always to all of you, users & contributors alike!

Regards,
Jeff


-- 
Jeff Forcier
Unix sysadmin; Python/Ruby engineer
http://bitprophet.org