pies-1.3 released [stable]

[Sergey Poznyakoff]

Hello,

This is to announce the release of GNU pies version 1.3.

GNU pies (pronounced ``p-yes'') is a program invocation and execution
supervisor.  It starts and controls execution of external programs, making
it possible, in particular, to run in background programs that were not
designed to be run as daemons.  Pies configuration file allows administrator
to specify arbitrary actions to be executed upon program termination 
(depending on its exit code or signal number it terminated by).  It gives
administrator complete control over the execution environment of each
program.  This includes modifying shell environment, running components with
the given user privileges, etc.  The standard error and/or standard
output of any component may be redirected either to a disk file or to syslog.

Starting with this release, GNU pies can also be used as init process
daemon.

See the end of this message for a list of noteworthy changes in this version.

Here are the compressed sources:
  http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/pies/pies-1.3.tar.gz   (1.5MB)
  http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/pies/pies-1.3.tar.bz2  (1.1MB)

Here are the GPG detached signatures[*]:
  http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/pies/pies-1.3.tar.gz.sig
  http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/pies/pies-1.3.tar.bz2.sig

Use a mirror for higher download bandwidth:
  http://www.gnu.org/order/ftp.html

Here are the MD5 and SHA1 checksums:

ec4cad485e75fb2a6ddbc803839b0fe7  pies-1.3.tar.gz
40192b788f583a23eaaadac3b99cdb48  pies-1.3.tar.bz2
87c33ac1cee557267048dc21b587feb33dbd9004  pies-1.3.tar.gz
6881129a1fee59bf87db8f6d03cf79e74dc9f3d8  pies-1.3.tar.bz2

[*] Use a .sig file to verify that the corresponding file (without the
.sig suffix) is intact.  First, be sure to download both the .sig file
and the corresponding tarball.  Then, run a command like this:

  gpg --verify pies-1.3.tar.gz.sig

If that command fails because you don't have the required public key,
then run this command to import it:

  gpg --keyserver keys.gnupg.net --recv-keys 3602B07F55D0C732

and rerun the 'gpg --verify' command.

This release was bootstrapped with the following tools:
  Autoconf 2.69
  Automake 1.14
  Makeinfo 5.2
  Gnulib v0.1-634-g26989d0

NEWS
* SysV-style Init 

GNU Pies can now be used as init process daemon - the first process
started during booting.  The configuration can be supplied both as
a traditional /etc/inittab file or as a native GNU Pies configuration
file.  The control interface provides extensive monitoring and
management capabilities.

* Control interface

The running GNU Pies instance can be queried and reconfigured on the
fly via a TCP socket (either UNIX or INET).  Special utility, piesctl,
is included, which provides  command line interface for inspecting
the state of components, reloading configuration (including addition
or removal of configuration files on the fly), stopping and restarting
components, etc.

* Changes in configuration

Two new flags are provided:

- siggroup

This flag instructs pies to send termination signal to the process
group of the process being stopped.

- nullinput

Do not close standard input.  Redirect it from /dev/null
instead.   Use this option with commands that require their standard
input to be open (e.g. pppd nodetach).

** String concatenation

The adjacent string concatenation feature proved to create more
problems than solutions (in particular, with the "env" statement)
and was removed.

Best regards,
Sergey