v0.21.0: Beta release #10

[davmac314]

This is an interim release to fix a few serious (but rarely encountered) bugs that have been discovered since (but originating prior to) the 0.20.0 release. A small number of other changes have also been included.

Thanks to sponsors: Paweł Zmarzły (pzmarzly), Wesley Moore (wezm), M. Herdiansyah (konimex), Coleman McFarland (dontlaugh), q66, saolof, and private sponsors. Thanks also to one-time sponsor leejm516.

Changes:

• "dinitctl start" and "dinitctl restart" will now issue a warning if the service description file for the specified service is out-of-date (i.e. if it has changed since it was loaded by dinit). (The warning includes a hint to use "dinitctl reload").
• The dependency graph now has a limit of 32 levels of dependency. This limit is designed to prevent problems that could otherwise occur with an excessive dependency depth, which normally only occurs if there is a mistake in the service descriptions. The limit is enforced when dependencies are loaded or altered, and is checked by dinit-check.
• Service names are now validated, with only a specific set of punctuation characters now being allowed in service names; '.', '_' and '-' are allowed ('.' is not allowed as a first character). '@' remains valid to separate a service name from service arguments. Control characters are not allowed.

Build changes:

• Added the CPPFLAGS_LIBCAP build variable, which can be used to supply any additional preprocessor arguments (such as to specify include directories) required for use of libcap.
• Fix detection of libcap ('-lcap') by configure in some cases.

Fixes:

• Fix an issue causing a segfault if the console was issued a hangup (via vhangup(2) or similar).
• Fix a problem where the service command became corrupted if an attempt to reload a service was rejected due to introducing a dependency cycle.
• Fix enabling (via "dinitctl enable") services with an argument; this was incorrectly issuing an error.
• Fix a use-after-free on some error paths, which theoretically could have displayed garbled setting names (but in practice apparently had no effect).

Extra contributions:

• iacore, Wateir, and Aicaya Maro have contributed/updated shell completions and other utilities, as found in the "contrib" directory in the source tree.

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This discussion was created from the release v0.21.0: Beta release #10.

[softexpert]

Hi @davmac314 ,

Excellent news, thank you for your dedication!

Since you mentioned the dependency graph, is there a way to graphically represent the dependencies of the services (including the logical system targets) - through a special command-line utility or a parameter for dinitctl ?

Another powerful feature: auditing services as they are started (total duration, consumed memory, used cpu cycles, wait time - if there is a dependency with another service) would be a great addition, allowing thorough diagnostics.
Perhaps accumulating in memory the statistics until the log storage becomes available would make thing a bit easier to implement ...

I will compile and test the beta this evening, can't wait!

[davmac314]

is there a way to graphically represent the dependencies of the services (including the logical system targets) - through a special command-line utility or a parameter for dinitctl ?

There's no such feature, at the moment. It would be nice but I have so many other priorities, right now.

Another powerful feature: auditing services as they are started (total duration, consumed memory, used cpu cycles, wait time - if there is a dependency with another service) would be a great addition, allowing thorough diagnostics

Same for this. It might be possible to record the most recent start and stop time for each service and have that viewable via dinitctl status, for some release post 1.0.

[softexpert]

I built v0.21.0 on my Artix using the official package modified to load the v0.21.0 tag.
It compiled just fine and everything looks good after reboot.