----- Original message -----
Hi!
syslog-ng comes with a 'dummy' module, that does nothing, but emit a notice whenever it receives a message. I doubt anyone uses it, because it is useless, and serves as an aid for module writers only, as a skeleton to build on.
However, it is built AND installed by default, which is kinda awkward, in my opinion, and perhaps a bit confusing too: when I see a dummy module automatically installed, I start to wonder just what the heck it is good for and why it is there in the first place?
Since it's completely useless, I'd like to propose either of the following:
1) Remove the module completely from the source code.
The rationale behind this is that it's a very basic example, shows very little about how a destination driver should work, and is even a little bit stale here and there.
For example, the grammar directly pokes the driver structure, which is a bad habit (accessors are a whole lot better!).
Furthermore, when I wanted to write a driver, I looked at the dummy driver first, but after a couple of minutes, I concluded it has so very little information, that it's not enough for me as a starting point. So I started to look at other drivers, and learned from there.
In that sense, it doesn't even succeed at being a reasonable skeleton, or starting point.
A HOWTO document, or something similar about the architecture of the various drivers would be much much more useful, but this document is yet to be written.
2) Keep the module, but don't install it, ever.
As a compromise, the module could be kept, but not installed. This way we still have a very small example, but it's not installed needlessly.
I think it's obvious I'd rather go with the first option, but perhaps there's good reasons for keeping it, that I overlooked. The decision is in Bazsi's hand, anyway.
I completely agree it should be removed, it's been the first plugin of syslog-ng when I was working on modularizing the grammar and the core. So RIP. can you please post a patch that removes it? Thanks.