Development roadmap
This document outlines Fabric’s intended development path. Please make sure
you’re reading the latest version of this document!
Warning
This information is subject to change without warning, and should not be
used as a basis for any life- or career-altering decisions!
Near-term feature releases and support work
- Move non-code-related docs to a new static site on www.fabfile.org
(#419).
- Fabric 1.4: Logging integration (#57) and other UI tweaks,
possibly including colored output (#101) by default.
- Work on a new (to us; probably hacking an existing codebase) GitHub-focused
IRC bot (#169).
- Fabric 1.5: Network-related improvements, such as an option for skipping
or retrying unreachable or otherwise “bad” hosts (#8, #348,
#249).
Longer-term but probably still 1.x plans
In no particular order, some potential future feature releases:
- Work on our fork of Paramiko, ssh, to fix a number of outstanding
issues/deficiencies that
cause problems for Fabric itself (authentication failure reasons being
unclear, lack of SSH agent forwarding and/or gateway support, etc.)
- Re-examine Tav’s fork
and see if anything remains which A) has not already been implemented based
on older work, (meaning not @task or parallel execution), and B) fits well
with the current vision for Fabric’s feature set and style/behavior.
- Improve core execution mechanisms, mostly by chopping up fab‘s action
loop and exposing chunks of it via the API.
- Improved object-oriented design, both internal refactoring and at the API
level (for example, Host objects as an alternative to host strings.)
Fabric 2.0
- As a lead-in, any additional 1.x-compatible internal refactorings or API
add-ons, such as aforementioned OO design patterns. Get as much done as
possible without breaking backwards compatibility.
- Make decisions about what old ways of doing things should be axed in 2.0, or
which can be easily “wrapped” in newer mechanisms without requiring lots of
legacy code.
- Any other 2.x-marked tickets introducing new, clearly-backwards-incompatible
features (see list.)