These release notes are for an old release of Salt. This release might contain known security and other issues that are fixed in the latest release.

# Salt 0.10.0 Release Notes

release:

  2012-06-16

0.10.0 has arrived! This release comes with MANY bug fixes, and new capabilities which greatly enhance performance and reliability. This release is primarily a bug fix release with many new tests and many repaired bugs. This release also introduces a few new key features which were brought in primarily to repair bugs and some limitations found in some of the components of the original architecture.

## Major Features

### Event System

The Salt Master now comes equipped with a new event system. This event system has replaced some of the back end of the Salt client and offers the beginning of a system which will make plugging external applications into Salt. The event system relies on a local ZeroMQ publish socket and other processes can connect to this socket and listen for events. The new events can be easily managed via Salt's event library.

### Unprivileged User Updates

Some enhancements have been added to Salt for running as a user other than root. These new additions should make switching the user that the Salt Master is running as very painless, simply change the `user` option in the master configuration and restart the master, Salt will take care of all of the particulars for you.

### Peer Runner Execution

Salt has long had the peer communication system used to allow minions to send commands via the salt master. 0.10.0 adds a new capability here, now the master can be configured to allow for minions to execute Salt runners via the `peer_run` option in the salt master configuration.

### YAML Parsing Updates

In the past the YAML parser for sls files would return the incorrect numbers when the file mode was set with a preceding 0. The YAML parser used in Salt has been modified to no longer convert these number into octal but to keep them as the correct value so that sls files can be a little cleaner to write.

## State Call Data Files

It was requested that the minion keep a local cache of the most recent executed state run. This has been added and now with state runs the data is stored in a msgpack file in the minion's cachedir.

## Turning Off the Job Cache

A new option has been added to the master configuration file. In previous releases the Salt client would look over the Salt job cache to read in the minion return data. With the addition of the event system the Salt client can now watch for events directly from the master worker processes.

This means that the job cache is no longer a hard requirement. Keep in mind though, that turning off the job cache means that historic job execution data cannot be retrieved.

## Test Updates

### Minion Swarms Are Faster

To continue our efforts with testing Salt's ability to scale the minionswarm script has been updated. The minionswarm can now start up minions much faster than it could before and comes with a new feature allowing modules to be disabled, thus lowering the minion's footprint when making a swarm. These new updates have allows us to test

    # python minionswarm.py -m 20 --master salt-master

## Many Fixes

To get a good idea for the number of bugfixes this release offers take a look at the closed tickets for 0.10.0, this is a very substantial update:

https://github.com/saltstack/salt/issues?milestone=12&state=closed

### Master and Minion Stability Fixes

As Salt deployments grow new ways to break Salt are discovered. 0.10.0 comes with a number of fixes for the minions and master greatly improving Salt stability.