NEWS -*- outline -*- ---- Welcome to schroot 1.4.0. Please read these release notes carefully. Full installation instructions are provided in the INSTALL file. The README file also contains more specific notes regarding building and configuration. * Major changes in 1.4.0: None. For users upgrading from the previous stable release (1.2.x), please read the changes made since 1.2.3. Changes to the configuration file format may require some small changes to your existing configuration. * Major changes in 1.3.2: None. * Major changes in 1.3.1: 1) Kernel personality support should now work on non-Linux architectures such as kfreebsd. * Major changes in 1.3.0: None. * Major changes in 1.3.0-rc1: 1) Exec scripts have been removed. Unlike setup scripts, these scripts were never used, and there are no known uses for them. Removing them will improve the performance of schroot. The run-exec-scripts configuration option is no longer used, but is still permitted to be used until it is obsoleted in a future release. 2) Setup scripts are now always run for all chroot types except "plain". In practice, scripts were required for all types except "plain" in order to function correctly. The ability to configure this is not useful and so setting run-setup-scripts is now deprecated in schroot.conf. It may still be set for backward compatibility, but it has no effect and will be removed in the future. 3) Chroot configuration files in /etc/schroot/chroot.d are not loaded if they are backup files or dpkg conffile backups. 4) Support for GCC versions prior to 3.4 has been removed. 5) System databases are copied into the chroot using the getent program to use the appropriate name service switch (NSS) modules to get the data, rather than just copying the files. This means all NSS database sources are supported, including NIS and LDAP. 6) Setup script output is logged to stderr which prevents schroot outputting to stdout when run with verbose logging enabled. 7) Most schroot features are compiled conditionally, which should ease porting to non-Linux platforms. 8) Support for union filesystems has been added (aufs and unionfs). This permits the use of read-only block-device, directory and loopback chroots with a temporary writable overlay. For "scratch" temporary chroots, this method is recommended over the existing LVM snapshot support. It is considered to be faster, more robust, and uses less disc space. 9) The "command-prefix" option no longer requires an absolute path to the command. It will use the normal search path inside the chroot to locate the command. 10) When creating a session, the users in "users", "root-users", and groups in "groups" and "root-groups" are no longer preserved. The user requesting access will be the sole user listed in "users" for the session; however, if the user was in "root-users" or "root-groups", they will be added to "root-users" instead. This ensures that only the user creating the session will have access, so that other users having access to the chroot will not also automatically gain access to other users sessions. * Major changes in 1.2.3: None. * Major changes in 1.2.2: None. * Major changes in 1.2.1: 1) A new chroot type, "loopback", has been added. This is similar to the "block-device" type, but allows for loopback mounting of filesystems contained within regular files. 2) "lvm-snapshot" chroot types now clean up correctly in the case of failures during setup. * Major changes in 1.2.0: 1) In addition to /etc/schroot/schroot.conf, chroot definitions may be placed in separate files under /etc/schroot/chroot.d to enable packages and system administrators to easily make new chroots available to schroot. 2) Configuration files may now be symlinks as well as regular files. 3) schroot now builds with GCC 4.3. 4) All setup and exec scripts source and use the script configuration file specified with the script-config configuration key. * Major changes in 1.1.6: 1) Relicence under the GNU General Public License, version 3 or later. 2) Per-chroot custom mountpoints are now possible through the use of an fstab file. This may be used to mount or bind mount any filesystem within the chroot with the assistance of a helper utility, schroot-mount. Set FSTAB=fstab in the script-config file to specify which file to use. 3) Per-chroot custom file copying is now supported. Set COPYFILES=file in the script-config file to specify a file containing a list of files to copy from the host system into the chroot. This change merged the 20network and 30passwd setup scripts into a single script, 20copyfiles. If you previously customised either of these scripts, the changes will need to be copied over to the new files. 4) If invalid options are used in schroot.conf, warnings will be printed, rather than simply ignoring them. * Major changes in 1.1.5: 1) A "script-config" option has been added to allow customisation of the chroot setup and execution scripts on a per-chroot basis. See schroot.conf(5) for further details. 2) A --session-name has been added to allow naming sessions when using --begin-session. This replaces the automatically-generated chroot-UUID session name. * Major changes in 1.1.4: 1) When ending a session, processes still running in the chroot are terminated. * Major changes in 1.1.3: Bugfixes and translation updates only. * Major changes in 1.1.2: Bugfixes and translation updates only. * Major changes in 1.1.1: 1) For dchroot and dchroot-dsa, the syslog logging of the command or shell being run in the chroot now only occurs when running as root or switching to another user. If the user is the same inside and outside the chroot, and not root, the command or shell being run will not be logged. 2) Using symbolic links in the mount path (SCHROOT_MOUNT_DIR) will no longer result in severe dataloss. 3) User-defined filtering of the chroot environment is now permitted using the environment-filter key in the configuration file, which uses a regular expression to identify environment variables for removal. 4) The environment variables SCHROOT_COMMAND, SCHROOT_USER, SCHROOT_GROUP, SCHROOT_UID and SCHROOT_GID are set inside the chroot specifying the command being run, the user name, group name, user ID and group ID, respectively. * Major changes in 1.1.0: 1) Authentication now uses the Controlling TTY (/dev/tty) for communication with the user. This means PAM interaction with the user will work even if stdin, stdout and stderr are all redirected. If authentication is required and no CTTY is available, it will fail (due to authentication being an interactive process). 2) The syslog logging of the command or shell being run in the chroot now only occurs when running as root or switching to another user. If the user is the same inside and outside the chroot, and not root, the command or shell being run will not be logged. 3) A --directory option has been added to schroot, dchroot and dchroot-dsa. This option allows the user to explictly specify the working directory inside the chroot. * Major changes in 1.0.6: Bugfixes only. * Major changes in 1.0.5: Bugfixes only. * Major changes in 1.0.4: 1) Using symbolic links in the mount path (SCHROOT_MOUNT_DIR) will no longer result in severe dataloss. 2) LSB init script functions are now used. * Major changes in 1.0.3: 1) For dchroot and dchroot-dsa, the syslog logging of the command or shell being run in the chroot now only occurs when running as root or switching to another user. If the user is the same inside and outside the chroot, and not root, the command or shell being run will not be logged. * Major changes in 1.0.2: 1) The syslog logging of the command or shell being run in the chroot now only occurs when running as root or switching to another user. If the user is the same inside and outside the chroot, and not root, the command or shell being run will not be logged. 2) A --directory option has been added to schroot, dchroot and dchroot-dsa. This option allows the user to explictly specify the working directory inside the chroot. * Major changes in 1.0.1: Bugfixes and translation updates only. * Major changes in 1.0.0: Bugfixes and translation updates only. * Major changes in 0.99.4: 1) All errors in the configuration file now show the full details of the problem, including the exact line number, group and key. 2) Duplicate groups and keys with groups are now treated as errors. 3) The terminal state is only saved and restored when running a login shell. It is no longer saved and restored when running commands. This is to correct the problem of schroot being stopped when running in the background while restoring the terminal settings. 4) Child processes are now terminated when SIGTERM is received, in addition to SIGHUP. * Major changes in 0.99.3: 1) A new chroot type, "directory", has been added. This is the same as the "plain" type, but additionally allows filesystem mounting when setup scripts are enabled. 2) A further dchroot compatibility issue has been corrected. Multiple command options specified on the command line are concatenated into a single command, separated by spaces. * Major changes in 0.99.2: 1) A --debug option has been added to all programs. Its use is documented in the manual pages. 2) When errors are found in the chroot configuration, the line number in the configuration file is now reported. 3) The use of run-parts(8) is no longer needed. This should make the package portable to non-Debian systems. * Major changes in 0.99.1: 1) A dchroot-dsa compatibility mode has been implemented. This behaves in the same manner as the DSA dchroot program, and is useful for backward compatibility with DSA dchroot, as well as migrating from DSA dchroot. 2) The dchroot program is now compatible with the command-line syntax of older versions, and also matches the older behaviour of which directory is used inside the chroot. The behaviour is documented in the manual page. 3) In addition to "groups" and "root-groups" options for controlling chroot access, "users" and "root-users" have been added for finer control over access. Corresponding "source-users" and "source-root-users" options have been added for source chroots. 4) Files, Devices and Locations in schroot.conf must be absolute pathnames. Relative names are a security risk, because the behaviour may vary depending on the current working directory. It was previously the sysadmin's responsibility to set these correctly, but this rule is now strictly enforced. * Major changes in 0.99.0: 1) In order to support running 32-bit chroots on 64-bit systems, a "personality" option has been added. This may be set to "linux32" to run a 32-bit Linux chroot on an amd64 system, for example. 2) dchroot has an additional personality field in dchroot.conf. This may also be set to linux32 to achieve the same effect as the personality setting in schroot.conf. 3) The root user can access all chroots, even when the root group is omitted from the groups or root_groups lists. Authentication is still required, but by default is skipped due to using pam_rootok.so in the PAM configuration. 4) Session recovery is only performed at system startup, not on upgrades. This prevents upgrades interfering with active sessions. * Major changes in 0.2.11: 1) The 10mount script, used to unmount filesystem in a chroot, will exit with an error if unmounting fails (for safety). It also uses /proc/mounts (via a new program, schroot-listmounts) to ensure all filesystems in the chroot are unmounted. 2) The 05file script, used to unpack and repack chroot archives, will use schroot-listmounts to check if any filesystems are mounted before purging the chroot. This is in order to avoid dataloss. 3) Setup scripts can now abort on failure during cleanup (exec-stop and setup-stop phases). Previously the scripts continued in the face of failure, and broken sessions were removed. Broken sessions which failed to clean up must now be removed by the system administrator (which was required previously; it just wasn't apparent), or the session can be ended again once the problem has been rectified. * Major changes in 0.2.10: Bugfixes only. * Major changes in 0.2.9: 1) The package now compiles with older compilers, such as GCC 3.3 and 3.4. 2) If the current working directory does not exist inside the chroot, the user's home directory ($HOME, home directory in passwd, or /) will be used when running a login shell. If running a command and the directory does not exist, schroot will exit with an error. * Major changes in 0.2.8: Bugfixes only. * Major changes in 0.2.7: Bugfixes only. * Major changes in 0.2.6: 1) For all chroot types, a "command-prefix" option has been added. This is a command to prefix to all commands run inside the chroot. 2) The scripts run before and after executing a command or shell in the chroot have been moved from /etc/schroot/run.d to /etc/schroot/exec.d. The corresponding configuration option in schroot.conf has been renamed from "run-session-scripts" to "run-exec-scripts". This change was to reduce ambiguity in the naming, to make it easier to understand and configure. 3) The session operations "--recover-session", "--run-session", and "--end-session" now allow multiple chroots to be specified with "--chroot", rather than just one. 4) The "file" and "lvm-snapshot" chroot types both implement "source chroots", to provide access to the source block device and archive file, respectively. The "source-groups" and "source-root-groups" options have been added to set the "groups" and "root-groups" options for the source chroot. 5) The "file" chroot, when accessed as a source chroot using the "-source" suffix, will now automatically repack itself into a new archive file on ending a session. * Major changes in 0.2.5: 1) The output of "--info" now displays a "Path" line if available. This is the location of the chroot in the filesystem. * Major changes in 0.2.4: 1) For "block-device" and "lvm-snapshot" type chroots, it is now possible to add a "location" configuration option to specify the location of the chroot within the device filesystem, rather than assuming the location is always the root. This allows multiple chroots to be stored on a single LVM LV, for example. 2) For "plain" chroots, if setup scripts (run-setup-scripts) is enabled, session management is also enabled. This is not true session management, because it uses bind mounts rather than a copy of the chroot, so should be used with caution, but will make concurrent access to the chroot with session scripts enabled rather more useful. * Major changes in 0.2.3: 1) A dchroot compatibility mode has been implemented. This behaves in the same manner as the dchroot program, and is useful for backward compatibility with dchroot, as well as migrating from dchroot. 2) Access to the source device of an "lvm-snapshot" type chroot is simplified. For a chroot named "snap", a "block-device" type chroot named "snap-source" is created for easy access to the source device. 3) The output of "--info" now includes a "Session Managed" line, which is true if full session management is available, or false otherwise. * Major changes in 0.2.2: 1) Session metadata is now correctly saved and restored. 2) New option "--config" to dump chroot configuration, in the same manner as "--info". This is useful to test if the configuration you put in schroot.conf is what schroot is actually parsing. 3) Session-managed chroot types ("file" and "lvm-snapshot") now run setup and session scripts by default. It was previously disabled for all chroot types for safety reasons. It's considered safe for these types due to their ephemeral nature. * Major changes in 0.2.1: 1) Creating a session now returns a zero exit status on success. * Major changes in 0.2.0: 1) A new chroot type, "file", has been added, to allow chroots to be created by unpacking a file archive, such as a tar or zip file. 2) The source has been rewritten in C++, and documented with Doxygen. 3) A testsuite has been added to unit test as much functionality as is reasonably possible. * Major changes in 0.1.7: 1) The chroots now implement locking to restrict access to chroots which are already in use. 2) The "current-users" and "max-users" configuration options have been removed. These have been obsoleted by chroot locking. 3) The command-line options "--all-chroots" and "--all-sessions" have been added, which have similar behaviour to "--all", but selects all chroots and all active sessions, respectively. 4) Session creation, use and removal is now available for LVM snapshot chroots, using the options documented in schroot(1). 5) The session commands also work with non-session-based chroot types (plain and block-device), but is equivalent to using the chroot normally. 6) An init script is used to recover (restore) session chroots at system startup. 7) If no chroot is specified, schroot will fall back to using the "default" chroot. Adding a "default" alias to an existing chroot will make this chroot the default. * Major changes in 0.1.6: 1) Setup scripts may be run on startup and shutdown and before and after a command in order to perform setup tasks such as configuring the chroot and mounting filesystems. These are stored in /etc/schroot/setup.d and /etc/schroot/run.d, and run using run-parts(8). New scripts may easily be added by the system administrator. See schroot-setup(5). 2) Different types of chroots are now supported. The current types are "plain" (the default, which is the type supported by previous releases), "block-device" (a block device mounted on the fly) and "lvm-snapshot" (and LVM snapshot of an LV made on the fly). * Major changes in 0.1.5: 1) The authentication system has been extended to remove the dependency upon libpam_misc. There are no user-visible changes. 2) The root user (uid 0) no longer has special priveleges during authentication. If the root user should have special priveleges (such as not requiring authentication to change to any other user), do the following: - uncomment the pam_rootok.so line in pam.d/schroot. This will disable the requirement for root authentication. - add root to groups (root_groups membership is redundant), so that root is allowed access. 3) The configuration file, /etc/schroot.conf has been moved to /etc/schroot/schroot.conf. This should be moved automatically when upgrading the Debian package. 4) A new directory, /etc/schroot/setup.d has been added. This contains scripts to perform setup and cleanup tasks in the chroot, which are run with run-parts(8). This provides an easy was to configure and customise chroots. * Major changes in 0.1.4: 1) A new chroot configuration option, "priority", has been added. This is intended for use with sbuild, to indicate whether the distribution in a chroot is older than the distribution in another chroot. 2) The printed messages displaying the command or shell being run now correctly inform the user if the shell is a login shell or not. * Major changes in 0.1.3: 1) HOME, LOGNAME and USER are set in the environment if the old environment is not being preserved. 2) schroot now aborts earlier if no chroots are defined in schroot.conf, rather than failing with a confusing failed assertion error. 3) An option parsing bug which could sometimes cause a crash has been fixed. * Major changes in 0.1.2: 1) Support for gettext has been added, to allow localisation into any language. 2) If a command is specified, it will be searched for in $PATH. Previously, an absolute path was always required. * Major changes in 0.1.1: 1) Add a large number of pointer checks. * Major changes in 0.1.0: 1) Initial release. 2) Debian packaging created.