Spring Piqi releases

[Anton Lavrik]

Hello all,

Really happy to have these out. Finally!

    piqi v0.6.6

    piqi-ocaml v0.7.0

    piqi-erlang v0.7.1

    piqi-rpc v0.7.1

Changelogs:

    https://github.com/alavrik/piqi/blob/master/CHANGES

    https://github.com/alavrik/piqi-ocaml/blob/master/CHANGES

    https://github.com/alavrik/piqi-erlang/blob/master/CHANGES

    https://github.com/alavrik/piqi-rpc/blob/master/CHANGES

Updated roadmap:

    http://piqi.org/roadmap/

Here are some details.

1. piqi-ocaml turned into a separate project

One of the highlights of this release is separation of piqi-ocaml from

piqi. This completes the breaking of what used to be a monolithic

"piqi" repository into individual repos and, more importantly,

sub-projects.

In practice, it means a lot more independent development and releases

for all of them.

Piqi compiler for OCaml (now named piqic-ocaml) was rewritten on top

of the "piqi compile" interfaces. Together with piqic-erlang, which

was also improved as a result of this exercise, they make a canonical

example of how to write piqi backends.

There are a lot of improvements overall and some minor

incompatibilities in piqic-ocaml interfaces. See the changelog for

details.

2. piqi cleanup

No longer being held by piqi-ocaml, piqi sources layout has undergone

a major cleanup. Extremely pleased with the outcome:

- 3x faster build

- old multi-stage bootstrapping dropped in favor of a new clean system

  which is much easier to understand and use

- windows build overhaul -- now builds on modern OCaml for Windows out

  of the box

- support for cross-compiled win32 build

- dropped support for OCaml 3.11 and remove dependency on most Camlp4

  extensions

Overall, the core project has never been cleaner. For those who

considers hacking on it, this becomes very approachable now.

3. "Piqi is a universal schema language"

http://piqi.org now features a simplified and streamlined description

and project overview.

Check out the updated homepage and rationale

(http://piqi.org/rationale/).

4. Enhanced DSL capabilities

Perhaps all Piqi users know that .piqi syntax is based on the Piq

language. In a sense, Piqi is a declarative domain-specific language

that normally represented in Piq notation and defines itself via a

Piqi self-spec.

This combination turned out to be extremely powerful and flexible for

building other declarative DSLs. I've been it using quite successfully

for many small DSLs -- from config files and command-line interfaces

to SQL-like query languages.

The languages typically look nice, and, what's really cool, it takes

no time to build one. All you need is to describe your language in a

.piqi spec and Piqi takes care of both Piq-based concrete syntax and

automatically turning it into abstract syntax of your choice (Protocol

Buffers, JSON, XML and, of course, direct language representation).

A set of new features introduced in this release makes it even nicer:

- optionally omitting square brackets around record representation (so

  called frameless Piq input/output)

- optional quotes around single-word string literals (internally known

  as relaxed parsing)

- aliases for field and option labels that allow use of shorter names

  in Piq notation

- precise control over which syntax elements are allowed as positional

  elements and which should be always labeled

5. OCaml and Erlang: preserving unknown Protocol Buffers fields

A new --gen-preserve-unknown-fields flag was introduced for

piqic-ocaml and piqic-erlang. When specified, unrecognized Protocol

Buffers record fields are automatically captured during parsing and

get written back during serialization.

This helps to maintain reversibility of the representation making

applications that use older definitions forward-compatible.

There are a number of fixes and other improvements in all projects.

Thank you everyone who contributed to this release!

Anton

P.S. Each Piqi project now includes a TODO file.

[Motiejus Jakštys]

2014.04.09 10:53, Anton Lavrik rašė:
>
> Hello all,
>
>
> Really happy to have these out. Finally!
>
> piqi v0.6.6
> piqi-ocaml v0.7.0
> piqi-erlang v0.7.1
> piqi-rpc v0.7.1

Hi Anton,

congratulations! I am really happy about it, but since I had nothing
useful to say but "yay", didn't. Now I have something to say!

At Spil we are migrating to enhanced piqi-v0.6.6. Unfortunately, due to
the mess I created a year ago in our internal tools by relying on
unreliable command-line flags, the flavour[1].

Now it's time to update piqi in my PPA and I am making a tough decision:
1. Fork from upstream. Leads to horror and misery.
2. Convince you to apply and keep for a while a small compatibility
patch and keep it for a while (until we fully migrate our internal tools
to the new command-line interface).

While I completely understand your point in keeping the command-line API
clean and consistent AND no promise to keep it stable, I still ask for
an undocumented flag for The Better: no forking, 100% upstream
compatibility and less headaches.

What do you think?

Regards,
Motiejus

[1]:
https://github.com/spilgames/piqi/commit/29db1456e36449277d8d5fb234190dd9f0f0f6cd

[Anton Lavrik]

Hi Motiejus,

I don't think accepting such change would be a right thing to do for the project. Sorry.

You could create 'piqi' wrapper that calls 'real-piqi --version' just as easily. On the other hand, the change is so simple. It feels weird that updating your environment is more difficult than patching the upstream.

Anton

[Motiejus Jakštys]

Hi Anton,

fair enough, thanks for the reply. I updated my ppa[1] with 0.6.6,
which is the upstream + the mentioned[2] patch.

From now on I decided to maintain only LTS releases on my PPA
(currently lucid, precise and trusty). If anyone uses my PPA with
another distribution, please let me know.

[1]: https://launchpad.net/~motiejus/+archive/piqi
[2]: https://github.com/spilgames/piqi/commit/29db1456e36449277d8d5fb234190dd9f0f0f6cd


--
Motiejus Jakštys