salt/doc/topics/releases/2015.2.0.rst

==============================================
Salt 2015.2.0 Release Notes - Codename Lithium
==============================================

The 2015.2.0 feature release of Salt was focused on hardening Salt and
mostly on improving existing systems. A few major additions were made,
primarily the Beacon system. But most enhancements have been focused around
improving existing features and interfaces.

As usual the release notes are not exhaustive and primarily include the most
notable additions and improvements. Hundreds of bugs have been fixed and
many modules have been substantially updated and added.

Beacons
=======

The beacon system allows the minion to hook into system processes and
continually translate external events into the salt event bus. The
primary example of this is the :py:mod:`~salt.beacons.inotify` beacon. This
beacon uses inotify to watch configured files or directories on the minion for
changes, creation, deletion etc.

This allows for the changes to be sent up to the master where the
reactor can respond to changes.

Sudo Minion Settings
====================

The new ability to run the minion as a non-root user but add the ability for the
minion to execute commands via sudo has been added, simply add `sudo_user: root`
to the minion config, run the minion as a non-root user and grant that user
sudo rights to execute salt-call.

Lazy Loader
===========

The Lazy Loader is a significant overhaul of Salt's module loader system. The
Lazy Loader will lazily load modules on access, instead of all on start. In
addition to major performance improvement this "sandboxes" modules-- meaning a
bad/broken import of a single module will only effect jobs that require accessing
the broken module. (:pull: `20274`)

Enhanced Active Directory Support
=================================

The eauth system for LDAP has been extended to support Microsoft Active Directory
out of the box. This includes Active Directory and LDAP group support for eauth.

Salt LXC Enhancements
=====================

The LXC systems have been overhauled to be more consistent and to fix many
bugs.

This overhaul makes using LXC with Salt much easier and substantially improves
the underlying capabilities of Salt's LXC integration.

Salt SSH
========

- Additional configuration options and command line flags have been added to
  configure the scan roster on the fly

- Added support for ``state.single`` in ``salt-ssh``

- Added support for ``publish.publish``, ``publish.full_data``, and
  ``publish.runner`` in ``salt-ssh``

- Added support for ``mine.get`` in ``salt-ssh``

New Windows Installer
=====================

The new Windows installer for Salt changes how salt is installed on Windows.
The old installer used bbfreeze to create an isolated python environment to
execute in, this made adding modules and python libraries difficult. The new
installer sets up a more flexible python environment making it easy to manage
the python install and add python modules.

Removed Requests Dependency
===========================

The hard dependency on the requests library has been removed. Requests is still
required by a number of cloud modules but is no longer required for normal Salt
operations.

This removal fixes issues that were introduced with requests and salt-ssh, as
well as issues users experienced from the many different packaging methods used
by requests package maintainers

Python 3 Updates
================

While Salt does not YET run on python 3 it has been updated to INSTALL on
python 3, making us one step closer. What remains is getting the test suite
to the point where it can run on python 3 so that we can verify compatibility.

RAET Additions
==============

The RAET support continues to improve, RAET now supports multi master and many
bugs and performance issues have been fixed. RAET is much closer to being a
first class citizen.

Modified File Detection
=======================

A number of functions have been added to the RPM-based package managers to
detect and diff files that are modified from the original package installs.
This can be found in the new pkg.modified functions.

Misc Fixes/Additions
====================

- Add ``only_upgrade`` argument to apt-based ``pkg.install`` to only install a
  package version if the package is already installed. (Great for security
  updates!)

- Joyent now requires a ``keyname`` to be specified in the provider
  configuration. This change was necessitated upstream by the 7.0+ API.

- Add ``args`` argument to ``cmd.script_retcode`` to match ``cmd.script`` in
  the :py:mod:`cmd module <salt.cmd.cmdmod>`. (:issue:`21122`)

- Fixed bug where TCP keepalive was not being sent on the defined interval on
  the return port (4506) from minion to master. (:issue: `21465`)

- LocalClient may now optionally raise SaltClientError exceptions. If using
  this class directly, checking for and handling this exception is recommended.
  (:issue: `21501`)

- The SAuth object is now a singleton, meaning authentication state is
  global (per master) on each minion. This reduces sign-ins of minions from 3->1
  per startup.

- Nested outputter has been optimized, it is now much faster.

- Extensive fileserver backend updates.

Deprecations
============

- Removed ``parameter`` keyword argument from ``eselect.exec_action`` execution
  module.

- Removed ``runas`` parameter from the following ``pip``` execution module
  functions: ``install``, ``uninstall``, ``freeze``, ``list_``, ``list_upgrades``,
  ``upgrade_available``, ``upgrade``. Please migrate to ``user``.

- Removed ``runas`` parameter from the following ``pip`` state module
  functions: ``installed``, ``removed``, ``uptodate`` . Please migrate to ``user``.

- Removed ``quiet`` option from all functions in ``cmdmod`` execution module.
  Please use ``output_loglevel=quiet`` instead.

- Removed ``parameter`` argument from ``eselect.set_`` state. Please migrate to
  ``module_parameter`` or ``action_parameter``.

- The ``salt_events`` table schema has changed to include an additional field
  called ``master_id`` to distinguish between events flowing into a database
  from multiple masters. If ``event_return`` is enabled in the master config,
  the database schema must first be updated to add the ``master_id`` field.
  This alteration can be accomplished as follows:

    ``ALTER TABLE salt_events ADD master_id VARCHAR(255) NOT NULL;``

Known Issues
============

- In multimaster mode, a minion may become temporarily unresponsive
  if modules or pillars are refreshed at the same time that one
  or more masters are down. This can be worked around by setting
  'auth_timeout' and 'auth_tries' down to shorter periods.