salt/doc/topics/releases/0.9.8.rst

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Salt 0.9.8 Release Notes
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Salt 0.9.8 is a big step forward, with many additions and enhancements, as
well as a number of precursors to advanced future developments.

This version of Salt adds much more power to the command line, making the
old hard timeout issues a thing of the past, and adding kwargs support to
salt calls. These additions are also available in the salt client api, making
the available api tools much more powerful.

The new pillar system allows for data to be stored on the master and
assigned to minions in a granular way similar to the state system.

Additions to requisites making them much more powerful have been added and
improved error checking for sls files in the state system. A new provider
system has been added to allow for redirecting what modules function in
the background for individual states.

Support for OpenSUSE has been added and support for Solaris has begun
serious development.

The matcher and target systems have received a great deal of attention, the
default behavior of grain matching has changed slightly to reflect the regular
salt default behavior and the compound matcher system has been greatly refined.

A number of impressive features with keyword arguments have been added to both
the cli and to the state system, making states much more powerful and flexible,
but available in a clean and simple way.

The new batch size capability allows for executions to be rolled through the
targeted minions.


Major Features
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Pillar
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Pillar offers an interface to declare variable data on the master that is then
assigned to the minions. The pillar data is made available to all modules,
states, sls files etc. It is compiled on the master and is declared using the
existing render system. This means that learning pillar should be fairly
trivial to those already familiar with salt states.

CLI Additions
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Better State Return Data
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Kwargs and States
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Kwargs and the CLI
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Matcher Refinements and Changes
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Providers
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Requisite Glob Matching
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Batch Size
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In Progress Development
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Master Side State Compiling
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While we feel strongly that the advantages gained with minion side state
compiling is very critical, it does prevent certain features what may be
desired. 0.9.8 has support for initial master side state compiling, but many
more components still need to be developed, it is hoped that these can be
finished for 0.9.9.

The goal is that states can be compiled on both the master and the minion
allowing for compilation to be split between master and minion.