[syslog-ng] preparing for 1.9.9

[Balazs Scheidler]

On Mon, 2006-02-20 at 02:06 +0100, Roberto Nibali wrote:

> ... if the segfaults are gone ;).

I've fixed a segfault in this release, and as of now I don't know about
any others.

> 
> > 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?

Yes, I'd like to release a stable syslog-ng 2.0 out of the door. The
more exciting features will be added to a new branch.

> 
> > 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?

Yes, that is something I was thinking about, I originally wanted to
avoid the complexity of a control channel. That might be missing from
2.0.0 though.


> >         * 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?

Sometimes messages from the kernel are not prefixed by a proper priority
prefix. I had this request in our bugzilla and as it was trivial I
implemented it.

> >         * 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.

The problem was a stale reference between AFSocketSourceConnection and
the AFSocketSourceDriver objects through SIGHUP.

AFSocketSourceConnections are kept through SIGHUP (so that they are not
closed), but AFSocketSourceDrivers are not. Similarly the LogReader
associated with AFSocketSourceConnection has a reference to its
LogReaderOptions which was again stored in AFSocketSourceDriver.

The solution was get rid of this stale reference to point to the newly
created driver object, this was archieved by adding a
afsocket_sc_set_owner() function which makes sure all references are
properly updated.

See the changelog entry for 2006-02-11 for more details.

> >         * 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.

Thanks.

-- 
Bazsi