[Announce]: New features in 1465.0.0

[Alex Crawford]

Hello everyone,

While we usually don't send updates for every release, 1465.0.0
(released to the Alpha channel) has a few major changes that are worth
noting.

First, 1465.0.0 included Ignition 0.17.1 which stabilized the 2.1.0
configuration specification [1]. This new configuration has stabilized a
handful of new options. The details are covered in our documentation
[2]. The 2.1.0 specification is backward compatible with 2.0.0, so
you'll just be able to update the version number to take advantage of
the new features. The online validator [3] can be used to validate your
configs as you try it out. Ignition, of course, will continue to accept
2.0.0 configs.

Second, 1465.0.0 added support for using Ignition on Vagrant with the
VirtualBox backend. By default, the Vagrantfile will use the new
Vagrant-VirtualBox image (which only supports Ignition), but this can be
changed to use the older, generic Vagrant image which does support
coreos-cloudinit. This is all still very new, so we are still in the
process of updating the documentation on our site.

We are very interested to hear what you all think about the recent
changes (both good and bad). As always, we are watching this mailing
list, our bug tracker [3], and IRC [4].

-Alex

[1]: https://coreos.com/ignition/docs/latest/configuration-v2_1.html
[2]: https://coreos.com/ignition/docs/latest/migrating-configs.html#from-version-200-to-210
[3]: https://issues.coreos.com
[4]: irc://irc.freenode.org:6697/#coreos

[Charles Allen]

Thank you, Alex,

Is there any special flags that need to be controlled in the Config Transpiler https://github.com/coreos/container-linux-config-transpiler to make sure one does or does not create the wrong ignition spec for the wrong version of coreos (i.e. don't create a 2.1.x ignition for pre-1465)?

[Alex Crawford]

On 07/12, Charles Allen wrote:
> Is there any special flags that need to be controlled in the Config
> Transpiler https://github.com/coreos/container-linux-config-transpiler to
> make sure one does or does not create the wrong ignition spec for the wrong
> version of coreos (i.e. don't create a 2.1.x ignition for pre-1465)?

Ah, that's a good question. Right now CT will only generate 2.0.0
configs. We are still trying to figure out the best way to migrate to
2.1.0 (the options included: specifying the Container Linux version,
specifying the Ignition version, implicitly determining the version
based on the features used).

We aren't going to migrate CT until this version of Ignition is in every
channel, so you won't have to worry about the change just yet.

-Alex