Heptapod 0.7.0 released
We're glad to announce the release of Heptapod 0.7.0, on Docker Hub.
Deploying this version performs several significative data migrations. Care must be applied to backup all data before upgrading.
It's been an exciting development cycle, laying the ground for the major advances of the next one. We had notably:
- base software version updates for the first time (GitLab 10.3.9, Mercurial 5.2 / Evolve 9.2.1), and a systematic strategy to upgrade GitLab in the future
- more direct serving of Mercurial repositories
- better consistency in the exposition of Mercurial to the GitLab application layer (essential for CI)
and last but not least, we got the Continuous Integration officially supported, thanks to the launch of the Heptapod Runner project, derived from early experiments by the fine people at Logilab.
As usual, the full changelog can be read online alongside the Dockerfile and in the full description of the images in Docker Hub.
Heptapod and Bitbucket
Heptapod has a Bitbucket import feature that is nearing completion, and is already sufficient in many cases.
We've switched a few projects from Bitbucket to our Heptapod instances, and performed interesting experiences in the timeframe of our 0.6.x series. This will be the subject of a later post.
Interested people can watch our Bitbucket issues list.
To summarize, there are only two missing features to declare our Bitbucket import to be complete:
- Pull Requests from forks
- Issue attachments
We plan to develop them in the 0.7.x series.
There's little doubt we'll be in a very good position to provide a seamless Bitbucket replacement by their first deadline of Feb 1st.
A stable branch for Heptapod 0.7
We're adopting a workflow in which a new series, such as 0.7.x, 0.8.x is preceded by a release branch, morphing naturally into a stable branch, from which the subsequent point releases will be made.
The goal is to make our upgrades of the base GitLab version easier to perform and more robust.
This is explained in detail in https://dev.heptapod.net/heptapod/heptapod/issues/127.
Ongoing development of Heptapod 0.8
The goals for the new development cycle are:
- to develop SSH support. Some of the underlying infrastructure has been set in place in 0.7.0.
- to start the hgitaly project, our implementation of the Gitaly protocol for Mercurial. Everything appears to be set in place for that, although it won't probably enter service before a couple of cycles.
- to bump the GitLab base version to 10.4 or 10.5. Which one depends actually on the time other developments will take.