[elbe-users] ELBE v15.0 release

[Thomas Weißschuh]

Dear ELBE users,

We are happy to announce that the new version v15.0 of ELBE has been released.
This release is focused on bugfixes, stabilization and cleanups, a full list of
notable changes can be found at the end of this mail.

The *next* goals for ELBE are (in no particular order):

* Improved build speed
* Better errormessages
* More flexibility with initvms, for example the usage of containers
* Better reproducibility


To enable these features and ease the maintenance some existing functionality
is scheduled to be *removed*. If you are using this functionality, please let us know.

* Usermanagement in the initvm
* Versionmanagement in the initvm
* Various commands only usable from within the initvm and superseded by SOAP calls.


In case of questions, bug reports or any other feedback please write to
mailto:elbe-users at linutronix.de or open a ticket at https://github.com/Linutronix/elbe .

As part of this release we also restructured the Debian repository metadata to be more useful.
When updating the package metadata you will receive the following messages from apt:

    E: Repository 'http://debian.linutronix.de/elbe bookworm InRelease' changed its 'Origin' value from '. bookworm' to 'Linutronix'
    E: Repository 'http://debian.linutronix.de/elbe bookworm InRelease' changed its 'Label' value from '. bookworm' to 'Linutronix Debian Repo'
    N: Repository 'http://debian.linutronix.de/elbe bookworm InRelease' changed its 'Suite' value from 'bookworm' to ''
    N: This must be accepted explicitly before updates for this repository can be applied. See apt-secure(8) manpage for details.

Please accept these changes.


Thank you for reading,
Thomas Weißschuh


Features
--------

- A *preview* of a cylonedx-sbom generator is provided, which generates
  Software Bill of Materials from ELBE builds.
- A log of the initvm installation is kept to help analyzing issues.
  Shell-control characters are not printed anymore.
- A new package `elbevalidate` is provided to validate the contents of created images.
  It is used in the testsuite of elbe itself, too.
- F2FS can be used.
- Implement `elbe initvm destroy`.
- Packages can now be pinned more flexibly.
  See `release-archive`, `release-component`, `release-label`, `release-name`,
  `release-origin` and `release-version` in the schema documentation.
- The initvm can be created without libvirt, using only QEMU. Use `elbe initvm create --qemu`.
- The initvm can now be built from HTTPS repositories.
- The options `--nested` and `--devel` are now automatically detected and don't need to be specified anymore.


Bugfixes
--------

- (Nearly) all lintian errors about the Debian package have been fixed.
- Internally many cleanups have been performed.
- Make sure /var/cache/elbe exists for updated.
- The existing unittests of ELBE where cleaned up and bit-rot issues are fixes.
- The initvm can now also work with the default `/home` permissions on Debian bookworm.
- `/etc/resolv.conf` from the initvm is not leaked anymore into the image.
  Finetuning can also modify `/etc/resolv.conf` properly.


Improved Documentation
----------------------

- The build of the documentation is simplified greatly.
  Only Sphinx is necessary now.
- The website is now maintained as part of the ELBE source tree and built with Sphinx.


Deprecations and Removals
-------------------------

- Drop `$ELBE_MIRROR_SED` support.
- Drop `elbe control shutdown_initvm`. Use `elbe initvm stop` instead.
- Drop `install_elbe_version`.
- Drop non-functional `$ELBE_PBUILDER_JOBS` configuration variable.
- Remove cherrypy dependency.