Dear XRootD community,
XRootD 5.6.0 has been released last Friday. This is the first
feature release since I started releasing XRootD back in February
of this year, so I'd like to highlight some of the changes that you
should know about when upgrading.
In this release, we have started an effort to modernize the CMake
build system of XRootD and its Python bindings. In the first part
of this work, we've moved to require CMake 3.16, mostly due to its
improved support for Python virtual environments, and moved to
"modern CMake" style using target-based commands. In the next major
release, we will also work on providing exported targets for XRootD
for use by downstream projects as well.
The build system for the Python bindings was rewritten from scratch
to follow PEP517 (https://peps.python.org/pep-0517/). We also added
support for building the Python bindings both against a pre-installed
version of XRootD, as well as a standalone package by adding a top-level
setup.py file that can drive the CMake build. It is now also possible
to create binary wheels. The Python bindings themselves were improved
to better support Python3, so it's no longer necessary to use raw
strings in the APIs, now it's possible to use regular unicode strings.
The server has seen several improvements, like the ability to specify
the minimum/maximum file creation mode, the maximum number of file
descriptors is now configurable (default is 256k), along with several
improvements related to cryptography, like new DH params which allow
old clients communicate with new servers and vice-versa, the move to
SHA256 as default algorithm for signatures and message digests, and
more. Error mapping and handling has been improved in several areas,
like mapping some HTTP 500 errors to more appropriate error codes.
The client has seen two important improvements, the first of which is
the increase in the default number of event loops for processing
requests, which has been identified in benchmarks to be a problem for
performance in some cases, like highly parallel data analysis with ROOT.
The second improvement was in the handling of TLS, allowing fallback to
non-TLS authentication methods in the presence of ZTN as authentication
method. Older clients would fail if TLS could not be enabled, but the
new client allows falling back to Kerberos and other authentication
methods when using the --notlsok option. Note that using roots:// as a
protocol will always enforce TLS, however.
Finally, this release has also received some updates in documentation,
with new READMEs added in Markdown format and updated instructions on
how to install XRootD with common package managers, how to build from
source, and how run the available tests.
For the full release notes, where you can also see all bugs that have
been fixed in this release, please follow the link below:
https://github.com/xrootd/xrootd/releases/tag/v5.6.0
Kind regards,
-Guilherme, on behalf of the XRootD development team
########################################################################
Use REPLY-ALL to reply to list
To unsubscribe from the XROOTD-L list, click the following link:
https://listserv.slac.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/wa?SUBED1=XROOTD-L&A=1
