Back in the middle of July, we started two hares at once in Conary development: major client improvements for Conary 1.2, and major repository server improvements for Conary 2.0 (the third branch mentioned at that time was just a maintenance branch, so it doesn't count as a hare). In August, I blogged about the core improvement that we initially focused on making in Conary 1.2. It took a few months to iron out all the wrinkles in the variety of features we added for Conary 1.2 (especially some dependency enhancements), during which time we didn't do very frequent updates of Conary 1.1. (We were not satisfied with that and so have done frequent releases of Conary 1.2 while continuing our work on Conary 2.0.)

In parallel, since July, we have been working on significant repository server changes for Conary 2.0. Now, the server code changes are generally working (tests have passed), and some recent improvements to client code are related to the the changes in the server code. Those two facts mean that we are getting close to releasing Conary 2.0. Many of the changes speed up normal operations, both for system updates and for development operations like committing, promoting, and shadowing.

You want to try this out? Great! The conary-snapshot.rpath.org repository now provides recent snapshots of Conary 2.0 instead of current Conary 1.2 development. (Also, we are moving some of our repositories to Conary 2.0 for further validation.)

We still have testing to do. We have not done much profiling of memory consumption, for instance. We have just now made rMake compatible with Conary 2.0, but haven't done a release of rMake yet with those changes.

What can you expect?

• Regular releases of Conary 1.2 with continued maintenance.
• Nightly (and as needed) snapshot builds of Conary 2.0 on conary-snapshot.
• Backward and forward compability; Conary 1.2 clients will talk to Conary 2.0 repositories, and Conary 2.0 clients will talk to Conary 1.2 repositories.
• If you run your own standalone repository, moving to Conary 2.0 will require a repository migration. Be aware that Conary 2.0 is still in testing, and that we may make further schema changes that require further migration. Migration is done with conary/server/server.py --config-file /path/to/repo.cnr --migrate (if you don't know what that means, you might not want to migrate your repository just yet). We would recommending backing up your database first, just in case you are the first to discover a bug in our migration pathway!