Farrow 0.3.0: explicit catalogs and actionable readiness

2026-09-02 In Release

Release

Explicit image-catalog updates, per-node bootstrap diagnostics, native guest interface names, and a smaller CLI.

Farrow 0.3.0 was the public pre-1.0 release superseded by 0.4.0. It removes implicit Catalog refreshes, turns guest bootstrap failures into actionable per-node results, and simplifies the CLI without changing the Pigsty Inventory or fixed-IP deployment model.

What changed

up, plan, and ordinary image commands use one active local Catalog snapshot and never fetch Catalog metadata implicitly. farrow update explicitly fetches the configured repository; image sync activates an exact URL or file.
Guest bootstrap writes an atomic failure stage. Partial operations report every failed node, stage, and error, and readiness failures point directly to farrow logs <node>.
Already-running guests can be rechecked without restarting QEMU. A partial lifecycle still rebuilds the SSH client configuration from every committed node.
Netplan matches deterministic MAC addresses without renaming interfaces. vm_disks[].fs: auto prefers XFS and falls back to ext4 when necessary.
The redundant ss command and ambiguous root/flag shorthands are removed. image reset replaces reset-manifest, which remains an alias.

Verification boundary

Source commit da6d02426da93c677c94c67fec4eb4fcecf4766a passed the complete local source gate and a full GoReleaser snapshot: unit and race tests, vet, Staticcheck, govulncheck, four target builds, image-pipeline and installer boundaries, archive/package parity, dependency licenses, SBOMs, and native Linux package verification. The tag workflow repeated those checks before the Release was made public.

This release does not claim a new native VM replay. The dated macOS arm64/HVF and Ubuntu amd64/KVM evidence remains listed on the Status page; source, package, release, and native-host evidence remain separate gates.

Install or upgrade

Download the installer and assets from the Farrow 0.3.0 GitHub Release:

curl -fLO https://github.com/pgsty/farrow/releases/download/v0.3.0/install.sh
chmod +x install.sh
FARROW_VERSION=0.3.0 ./install.sh
farrow version
farrow doctor

Homebrew formula and amd64/arm64 DEB/RPM packages are attached to the same pre-release. Existing 0.1/0.2 deployment and Catalog state remains readable; Catalog refresh is now always explicit.