[syslog-ng]Filter enhancement

[Jay Guerette]

>> I would like to filter messages through an external program, ideally
>> spawned as a child process like the 'program()' destination target.
>>
>> This could serve 2 functions:
>> 1. Perform more complex filtering, or dynamic filtering based on input
>> from a database or other 3rd source.
>> 2. Reformat the messages as they pass through the filter.
>>
>> A message could be sent to the external process via STDIN, it is
>> evaluated and conditionally sent back via STDOUT. If a message is to
>> be dropped according to the filter criteria of the external process,
>> it would have to sendback a NULL character to syslog-ng as an
>> indicator.
>
> Of course we would like to have PCRE at our disposal for this
> filtering, if we're going to go to the trouble to implement this.

My thought was, keep syslog-ng focused on it's core functionality. "Do one
thing and do it well". It's current filtering ability is great, and makes
sensewithin the scope of the program. Yes, adding PCRE would be incredibly cool,
and by modularizing that ability in this way, keeps the core clean and light.

BTW, when thinking of external filtering programs, I am ONLY thinking about
Perl.... what else would you use!