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).

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.)

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.)