[Twisted-Python] Foolscap-0.2.5 released

Brian Warner warner at lothar.com
Tue Mar 25 04:48:18 EDT 2008


I'm pleased to announce the release of Foolscap-0.2.5. Foolscap is the
successor to Perspective Broker, offering cryptographically-secure remote
method invocation, flexible object-graph serialization, a capability-based
object model, and more. Foolscap, for all your remote-object needs.

Source distributions are available from the Foolscap home page, PyPI, and
wherever fine remote-object products are sold:

 http://foolscap.lothar.com/trac
 http://foolscap.lothar.com/releases/foolscap-0.2.5.tar.gz
 http://foolscap.lothar.com/releases/foolscap-0.2.5.zip

As always, Foolscap releases are signed by my GPG key (1514A7BD).

In case you're wondering what happened to 0.2.4, or 0.2.3, you're right:
there have been several unannounced releases. A lot of the recent work has
gone into improvements in the logging subsystem (know as the "flog" system).
It is easy for Foolscap-using programs to publish a 'logport', to which the
'flogtool tail' command can connect and watch log events scroll by. Log
events can be gathered and inspected with command-line tools or a web-based
browser. Future work is planned to enable cross-application causality tracing
using the Causeway viewer.

In addition to logging changes, several other improvements have been made.
Duplication connection handling should be working better now. A number of
sample programs have been added to the distribution. Default size limits have
been removed from all Constraints.

A complete set of release notes for the last six months of releases is
attached below. All versions since 0.1.3 (released in May 2007) are
wire-compatible.

Foolscap is currently being deployed in the allmydata.org "Tahoe"
least-authority grid filesystem, which improves the chances that
wire-compatibility will be retained in the future. I am grateful to
allmydata.com (my employer) for supporting Foolscap development.

Please direct any questions to this, the twisted-devel mailing list. Bugs,
patches, and feature requests should be placed on the Foolscap Trac, at
http://foolscap.lothar.com/ .

cheers,
 -Brian



* Release 0.2.5 (25 Mar 2008)

** Compatibility

All releases between 0.1.3 and 0.2.5 (inclusive) are fully wire-compatible.

The new 'flogtool tail --catch-up' command requires a log publisher running
0.2.5 or later. 'flogtool tail' without the --catch-up option will work with
earlier publishers.

** Licensing clarification

Foolscap is distributed under the (very liberal) terms of the MIT license,
which is the same license that Twisted uses. It's been like this since the
beginning, but this is the first release to make this obvious by including a
LICENSE file.

** foolscap.logging Changes

'flogtool tail' now has a --catch-up option, which prompts the remote
publisher to deliver stored historical events to the subscribe, in proper
sequential order. This allows you to connect to a process that has just done
something interesting and grab a copy of the log events relevant to that
event.

'flogtool tail' also has a --save-to option, which specifies a filename to
which all captured events should be saved. This file can be processed further
with 'flogtool dump', 'flogtool filter', or 'flogtool web-viewer'. This
behaves much like the unix 'tee' utility, except that the saved data is
recorded in a lossless binary format (whereas the text emitted to stdout is
not particularly machine-readable).

'flogtool tail' and 'flogtool dump' both emit human-readable log messages by
default. The --verbose option will emit raw event dictionaries, which contain
slightly more information but are harder to read.

'flogtool create-gatherer' will create a log gatherer .tac file in a new
working directory. This .tac file can be launched with 'twistd', the standard
Twisted daemon-launching program. This is significantly easier to work with
than the previous 'flogtool gather' command (which has been removed). The new
--rotate option will cause the log-gatherer to switch to a new output file
every N seconds. The --bzip option will make it compress the logfiles after
rotating them. For example, a log gatherer that rotates and compresses log
files once per day could be created and launched with:

 flogtool create-gatherer --rotate 86400 --bzip ./workdir
 (cd workdir && twistd -y gatherer.tac)

** New sample programs

doc/listings/command-server.py and command-client.py are a pair of programs
that let you safely grant access to a specific command. The server is
configured with a command line to run, and a directory to run it from. The
client gets a FURL: when the client is executed, the server will run its
preconfigured command. The client gets to see stdout and stderr (and the exit
status), but does not get to influence the command being run in any way.
This is much like setting up an ssh server with a restricted command, but
somewhat easier to configure.

doc/listings/xfer-server.py and xfer-client.py are similar, but provide file
transfer services instead of command execution.

** New Features

Tub.setLocationAutomatically() will try to determine an externally-visible IP
address and feed it to Tub.setLocation(). It does this by preparing to send a
packet to a well-known public IP address (one of the root DNS servers) and
seeing which network interface would be used. This will tend to find the
outbound default route, which of course is only externally-visible if the
host is externally-visible. Applications should not depend upon this giving a
useful value, and should give the user a way to configure a list of
hostname+portnumbers so that manually-configured firewalls, port forwarders,
and NAT boxes can be dealt with.


* Release 0.2.4 (28 Jan 2008)

** Compatibility

All releases between 0.1.3 and 0.2.4 (inclusive) are fully wire-compatible.

** foolscap.logging Changes

*** 'flogtool filter' command added

This mode is used to take one event-log file and produce another with a
subset of the events. There are several options to control the filtering:
"--strip-facility=foolscap" would remove all the foolscap-related messages,
and "--after=start --before=end" will retain events that occur within the
given period. The syntax is still in flux, expect these options to change in
the next few releases. The main idea is to take a very large logfile and turn
it into a smaller, more manageable one.

*** error logging

Applications should avoid recording application-specific instances in log
events. Doing so will forces the log viewer to access the original source
code. The current release of foolscap uses pickle, so such instances will be
loadable if the viewer can import the same code, but future versions will
probably switch to using Banana, at which point trying to log such instances
will cause an error.

In this release, foolscap stringifies the type of an exception/Failure passed
in through the failure= kwarg, to avoid inducing this import dependency in
serialized Failures. It also uses the CopiedFailure code to improve
portability of Failure instances, and CopiedFailures have been made
pickleable.

The preferred way to log a Failure instance is to pass it like so:

 def _oops(f):
   log.msg("Oh no, it failed", failure=f, level=log.BAD)
 d.addErrback(_oops)

Finally, a 'log.err()' method was added, which behaves just like Twisted's
normal log.err(): it can be used in a Deferred errback, or inside an
exception handler.

*** 'flogtool web-viewer'

Adding a "sort=time" query argument to the all-events viewing page URL will
turn off the default nested view, and instead will sort all events strictly
by time of generation (note that unsynchronized clocks may confuse the
relative ordering of events on different machines). "sort=number" sorts all
events by their event number, which is of dubious utility (since these
numbers are only scoped to the Tub). "sort=nested" is the default mode.

The web-viewer now provides "summary views", which show just the events that
occurred at a given severity level. Each event is a hyperlink to the line in
the all-events page (using anchor/fragment tags), which may make them more
convenient to bookmark or reference externally.


* Release 0.2.3 (24 Dec 2007)

** Compatibility

All releases between 0.1.3 and 0.2.3 (inclusive) are fully wire-compatible.

** Bug Fixes

RemoteReference.getSturdyRef() didn't work (due to bitrot). It has been
fixed.

** foolscap.logging Changes

This release is mostly about flogging improvements: some bugs and misfeatures
were fixed:

*** tolerate '%' in log message format strings

Dictionary-style kwarg formatting is now done with a twisted-style style
format= argument instead of happening implicitly. That means the acceptable
ways to call foolscap.logging.log.msg are:

 log.msg("plain string")
 log.msg("no args means use 0% interpolation")
 log.msg("pre-interpolated: %d apples" % apples)
 log.msg("posargs: %d apples and %d oranges", apples, oranges)
 log.msg(format="kwargs: %(numapples)d apples", numapples=numapples)

The benefit of the latter two forms are that the arguments are recorded
separately in the event dictionary, so viewing tools can filter on the
structured data, think of something like:

  [e for e in allEvents if e.get("numapples",0) > 4]

*** log facility names are now dot-separated, to match stdlib logging
*** log levels are derived from numerical stdlib logging levels
*** $FLOGFILE to capture flog events during 'trial' runs

One challenge of the flogging system is that, once an application was changed
to write events to flogging instead of twisted's log, those events do not
show up in the normal places where twisted writes its logfiles. For full
applications this will be less of an issue, because application startup will
tell flogging where events should go (flogging is intended to supplant
twisted logging for these applications). But for events emitted during unit
tests, such as those driven by Trial, these events would get lost.

To address this problem, the 0.2.3 flogging code looks for the "FLOGFILE"
environment variable at import time. This specifies a filename where flog
events (a series of pickled event dictionaries) should be written. The file
is opened at import time, events are written during the lifetime of the
process, then the file is closed at shutdown using a Twisted "system event
trigger" (which happens to be enough to work properly under Trial: other
environments may not work so well). If the FLOGFILE filename ends in .bz2,
the event pickles will be compressed, which is highly recommended because it
can result in a 30x space savings (and e.g. the Tahoe unit test run results
in 90MB of uncompressed events). All 'flogtool' modes know how to handle a
.bz2 compressed flogfile as well as an uncompressed one.

The "FLOGTWISTED" environment variable, if set, will cause this same code to
bridge twisted log messages into the flogfile. This makes it easier to see
the relative ordering of Twisted actions and foolscap/application events.
(without this it becomes very hard to correlate the two sources of events).

The "FLOGLEVEL" variable specifies a minimum severity level that will be put
into the flogfile. This defaults to "1", which puts pretty much everything
into the file. The idea is that, for tests, you might as well record
everything, and use the filtering tools to control the display and isolate
the important events. Real applications will use more sophisticated tradeoffs
between disk space and interpretation effort.

The recommended way to run Trial on a unit test suite for an application that
uses Foolscap is:

 FLOGFILE=flog.out FLOGTWISTED=1 trial PACKAGENAME

Note that the logfile cannot be placed in _trial_temp/, because trial deletes
that directory after flogging creates the logfile, so the logfile would get
deleted too. Also note that the file created by $FLOGFILE is truncated on
each run of the program.


* Release 0.2.2 (12 Dec 2007)

** Compatibility

All releases between 0.1.3 and 0.2.2 (inclusive) are fully wire-compatible.
New (optional) negotiation parameters were added in 0.2.1 (really in 0.2.0).

** Bug Fixes

The new duplicate-connection handling code in 0.2.1 was broken. This release
probably fixes it.

There were other bugs in 0.2.1 which were triggered when a duplicate
connection was shut down, causing remote calls to never be retired, which
would also prevent the Reconnector from doing its job. These should be fixed
now.

** Other Changes

Foolscap's connection-negotiation mechanism has been modified to use foolscap
logging ("flog") instead of twisted.log .

Setting the FLOGFILE= environment variable will cause a Foolscap-using
program to write pickled log events to a file of that name. This is
particularly useful when you want to record log events during 'trial' unit
test run. The normal API for setting this file will be added later. The
FLOGTWISTED= environment variable will cause the creation of a twisted.log
bridge, to copy all events from the twisted log into the foolscap log.

The 'flogtool web-view' mode has been enhanced to color-code events according
to their severity, and to format Failure tracebacks in a more-readable way.


* Release 0.2.1 (10 Dec 2007)

** Compatibility

All releases between 0.1.3 and 0.2.1 (inclusive) are fully wire-compatible.
0.2.1 introduces some new negotiation parameters (to handle duplicate
connections better), but these are ignored by older versions, and their lack
is tolerated by 0.2.1 .

** New Features

*** new logging support

Foolscap is slowly acquiring advanced diagnostic event-logging features. See
doc/logging.xhtml for the philosophy and design of this logging system. 0.2.1
contains the first few pieces, including a tool named bin/flogtool that can
be used to watch events on a running system, or gather events from multiple
applications into a single place for later analysis. This support is still
preliminary, and many of the controls and interfaces described in that
document are not yet implemented.

*** better handling of duplicate connections / NAT problems

The connection-management code in 0.1.7 and earlier interacted badly with
programs that run behind NAT boxes (especially those with aggressive
connection timeouts) or on laptops which get unplugged from the network
abruptly. Foolscap seeks to avoid duplicate connections, and various
situtations could cause the two ends to disagree about the viability of any
given connection. The net result (no pun intended) was that a client might
have to wait up to 35 minutes (depending upon various timeout values) before
being able to reestablish a connection, and the Reconnector's exponential
backoff strategy could easily push this into 90 minutes of downtime.

0.2.1 uses a different approach to accomplish duplicate-suppression, and
should provide much faster reconnection after netquakes. To benefit from
this, both ends must be running foolscap-0.2.1 or newer, however there is an
additional setting (not enabled by default) to improve the behavior of
pre-0.2.1 clients: tub.setOption("handle-old-duplicate-connections", True).

*** new Reconnector methods

The Reconnector object (as returned by Tub.connectTo) now has three utility
methods that may be useful during debugging. reset() drops the backoff timer
down to one second, causing the Reconnector to reconnect quickly: you could
use this to avoid an hour-long delay if you've just restarted the server or
re-enabled a network connection that was the cause of the earlier connection
failures. getDelayUntilNextAttempt() returns the number of seconds remaining
until the next connection attempt. And getLastFailure() returns a Failure
object explaining why the last connection attempt failed, which may be a
useful diagnostic in trying to resolve the connection problems.

** Bug Fixes

There were other minor changes: an OS-X unit test failure was resolved,
CopiedFailures are serialized in a way that doesn't cause constraint
violations, and the figleaf code-coverage tools (used by foolscap developers
to measure how well the unit tests exercise the code base) have been improved
(including an emacs code-used/unused annotation tool).




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