Brioche v0.1.8: Preparing for the future

Brioche v0.1.8 is a pretty small release overall, with a few quality-of-life improvements, plus some enhancements to prepare for some future changes.

To get right into it, you can run brioche self-update to upgrade, or check the installation docs if you don’t have Brioche installed yet. You can also take a look at the release notes, if that’s more your speed.

Oh, and also a PSA about upcoming brioche-packages stuff that will impact older versions of Brioche!!

This release jumps us from TypeScript v5.9.3— introduced in the last release— up to TypeScript v6.0. I don’t think most projects will see much impact one way or the other from this upgrade… but this is laying the groundwork to be able to use TypeScript v7 in the future!

Additionally, Brioche now bundles a newer version of ESLint and typescript-eslint for linting, and enables some new lints by default. These linting changes could cause some breakages, especially in CI— e.g. if you’re using either the brioche check subcommand or the --check flag. I think most projects will get by without any changes required.

The new lint rules we’re enabling now are:

• strict-void-return
• no-useless-default-assignment
• no-unnecessary-template-expression

For more context, check out @jaudiger’s PRs that introduced these changes: #465 and #467

When jobs run building a package— say, when a process recipe or a download is running— you’ll now see the source path in the TUI view, which gives you a better sense of which step in your build is currently running.

Small heads up: some of the source paths that get shown aren’t always the most helpful. We thread through metadata to hide utility types wherever possible, but we’ll probably need to make some updates to the std package to make this more useful!

This improvement was introduced by @jaudiger in #466

This release includes a few more minor improvements to the Linux sandbox environment:

• The sandbox user is now part of a group (via a new /etc/groups file in the sandbox).
• Sandboxed programs now see a fixed hostname of localhost, rather than the host system’s hostname. To accommodate this, the sandbox now runs within an isolated UTS namespace.
• The sandbox now includes the files /etc/services and /etc/protocols. This helps with glibc compatibility (e.g. the functions getservbyname and getprotobyname).

These improvements were added in #459 by @jaudiger.

Since the cache overhaul in Brioche v0.1.5, we’ve used a custom archive format to store artifacts in the cache. This format has gone unchanged since it was first introduced… until now that is!

Brioche v0.1.8 now supports reading archives with a new R tag. This tag references another entry in the artifact by path, allowing for efficiently deduplicating complex directory trees.

@jaudiger added this change in #460, in order to unblock the (longstanding!) abseil_cpp PR in the brioche-packages repo.

Note that Brioche v0.1.8 doesn’t support writing this new archive tag yet! This is part of a 3-step plan:

1. Release support for reading the new archive tag in a stable release (you are here!)
2. Add support for writing the new archive tag in a nightly release. This will then be used by brioche-packages— unblocking packages like abseil_cpp.
3. Release support for writing the new archive tag in a future stable release.

PSA: Heads up that, once support for writing the new archive format lands, using the package cache for builds from brioche-packages will require Brioche v0.1.8 or later! Users of Brioche v0.1.7 should upgrade to v0.1.8 soon! Otherwise pulling new builds from the Brioche cache will start to fail!

---

And… those are the highlights! There’s some more goodies to be found in the release notes too.

I’m glad to be getting into a better flow of “smaller” releases, with a few nice quality-of-life improvements and bugfixes. That said, there’s some bigger stuff cooking too: I’ve been tinkering with a larger-scale refactor, which should hopefully start to open more doors towards the larger ideas I have for Brioche! …but, that may still be quite a ways off before that work is ready to see the light of day, so stay tuned for more news on that front over time!