[syslog-ng] preparing for 1.9.9

[Roberto Nibali]

Hello,

> I have spent the last two days on hacking syslog-ng with a good number
> of fixes and couple of features requested a long time ago. Syslog-ng
> 1.9.8 got into Debian sid and apart from a couple of problems the house
> is not burning :)

Congratulations and thanks for your hard work.

> In summary syslog-ng 1.9.x is getting into shape, and slowly might be
> ready for some more production-like environments.

... if the segfaults are gone ;).

> I would like to ask you to give a try to these snapshot releases I've
> just uploaded to our website. Assuming no grave problems are found in
> the next day or two I'll release 1.9.9 and hopefully we can have a
> stable 2.0.0 in the nearfuture.

So this is a feature freeze?

> I'm still not happy with the way log statistics (per source/destination
> dropped/processed counters) are written to the system log. I'm starting
> to think that the logfile is not necessarily the best medium to write
> this information to. I'm open to suggestions.

You could do it the squid way (or httpd for that matter) and have an 
external syslog-ng client (similar to squidclient) to poll or dump 
internal stats. Is that more to your liking?

> 1.9.9
> 
>         Some minor new features:
> 
>         * Added optional() option to pipe and unix drivers to make syslog-ng
>           start even if the required directories/files do not exist.
>         * Added DNS name resolution to udp and tcp targets.
>         * Added a stats() keyword for 1.6.x compatibility.
>         * Added processed counters for source/destination groups and the log
>           center.
>         * Added normalize_hostnames() option which converts all hostnames to
>           lower case.
>         * Added PID macro.
>         * Added kernel flag to sources to indicate that messages coming from
>           the source should default to 'kern.crit' instead of 'user.notice'

Rather than fix up the kernel source?

>         * Added frac_digits() option which controls how many digits are
>           printed in second fractions.
>         * Documentation updates.
> 
>         Changes:
> 
>         * Removed stats entries for files as they never lose messages and it
>           would only clutter the log statistics output.
>         * The meaning of the undocumented keep_timestamp() option was
>           changed and documented, it controls whether syslog-ng uses the
>           time of reception or the time included in the log message.
> 
>         Bugfixes:
> 
>         * Fixed port unreachable handling for UDP destinations.
>         * Fixed PRI macro processing as it included the local hostname in
>           addition to the priority value because of a missing break
>           statement.
>         * UNIX domain sockets are kept alive across SIGHUPs by default.
>         * Fixed a possible segmentation fault on SIGHUP.

Thank you! Could you point me to the respective patch, please, since I 
tried to fix that one in the past and spent 4 hours in vain. I would 
like to improve my debugging abilities regarding syslog-ng and 
understand your architecture better.

>         * Fixed timezone extraction from incoming messages with ISO
>           timestamp (only this syslog-ng can send these currently)
>         * Fixed HOST_FROM, FULLHOST_FROM, SOURCEIP, DATE, R_DATE, S_DATE
>           macros (some were still not implemented others worked incorrectly
>           in some circumstances)
>         * Fixed fractions of a second processing.

I'll see if we get 1.9.9 into our testing phase, despite having decided 
to go with the stable 1.6.9 for our servers. Previous versions of 
syslog-ng-1.9.x just didn't cut it.

Best regards,
Roberto Nibali, ratz
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