[syslog-ng] syslog-ng OSE 3.2beta1 has been released (source + binaries)

[Balazs Scheidler]

Dear syslog-ng users,

I'm happy to announce that an important milestone towards the new
syslog-ng release has been reached.

syslog-ng OSE 3.2beta1 has been uploaded to our website. It contains a
lot of important new functionality compared to 3.2alpha2 and also some
care has been taken to shake out release-critical bugs.

As of know I don't know about any Release Critical issues, but I do now
that a number of such bugs have been fixed since alpha2. So if you had
issues with the alpha release and didn't report the issues, it still is
probable that this release fixes them.

I think this beta is good enough for everyone to try out, so if you like
the new features, I'd appreciate if you could report with either
negative or positive feedback to the syslog-ng mailing list. 

If you haven't tracked 3.2 development so far, I'd recommend to read the
3.2alpha2 and 3.2beta1 announcements for a sumary of new features coming
in 3.2.

You can find these here:

http://www.balabit.com/downloads/files/syslog-ng/open-source-edition/3.2alpha2/changelog-en.txt
http://www.balabit.com/downloads/files/syslog-ng/open-source-edition/3.2beta1/changelog-en.txt

This time in addition to the source code, I also release syslog-ng
binaries for Linux/i386 and Linux/amd64. The binaries are not
thouroughly tested and will probably never be. The canonical release
format for syslog-ng is the source code. Anyway, if you feel there are
problems with the installer/binaries, feedback is welcome, we're willing
to fix them.

Here's the NEWS entry for the 3.2beta1 release:

3.2beta1
        Mon, 11 Oct 2010 12:25:07 +0200

        Changes and new features destined to the syslog-ng 3.2 release are
        complete, and starting with this release, only bugfixes and minor
        changes are possible. There's only one exception to this: the
        correllation framework in db-parser() is still considered
        experimental and is recommended for early adopters only.

        This beta has gone through some testing and initial blocker problems
        were fixed before the release. Right now I'm not aware of any
        serious issues, but as always, testing is appreciated.

        New features since 3.2alpha2:
        * Added support for message correllation in db-parser. See the
          relevant blog posts for more information:

          http://bazsi.blogs.balabit.com/2010/10/syslog-ng-correllation-updated/
          http://bazsi.blogs.balabit.com/2010/09/syslog-ng-correllation/

        * Added "pdbtool patternize", which implements automatic patterndb
          generation from a sample log file.

          http://gyp.blogs.balabit.com/2010/01/introducing-pdbtool-patternize/ 

        * Added template functions framework and some initial functions:

          http://bazsi.blogs.balabit.com/2010/09/introducing-template-functions/

          The new functions are: $(echo), $(grep) and $(if)

        * Added support to process native syslog.conf file using the
          syslogconf SCL plugin.

          http://bazsi.blogs.balabit.com/2010/09/syslog-ng-now-supports-the-syslog-conf-file-format/

        * Added support for comparison operators in filter expressions, e.g.
          it is now possible to use "$FACILITY_NUM" < "5". String and
          numeric operators are also provided, the same way as in perl.

        * syslog-ng now automatically detects if an incoming message is in
          RFC3164 or RFC5424 format. This means that the syslog driver can
          be used to process both.

        * Added pdbtool validation support, using the "pdbtool test --validate". 
          Requires an installed xmllint program.

        * pdbtool is now able to merge patterndb XML files recursively in
          order to make it easy to use the results of the patterndb project.

        * db-parser() automatically assigns class-specific tags to messages,
          this means that a message classified "system" will get a
          ".classifier.system" tag in addition to storing the class in a
          name-value pair named ${.classifier.class}

        * It is now possible to use multiple program name patterns for a
          single ruleset in patterndb.

        * Added $(ipv4-to-int) template function to convert an IP address to
          its numeric representation.

        Bugfixes since 3.2alpha2:
        * Fixed a possible infinite loop in "pdbtool test" in case
          program/message was missing from the sample message.

        * SQL: revert don't require the current CVS version of libdbi

        * Don't report "this config file version is too old" multiple times.

        * Underscore and dash are assumed to be equivalent in plugin names.

        * Various memory leaks were plugged.

        Removed functions:
        * Removed the use_time_recvd() global and per-destination option,
          deprecated since 3.0. Can be substituted with $R_ prefix in macro
          names.

        Other changes:
        * Restructured the source tree in order to make compilations of
          independent plugins easier and faster. Modules go to modules/
          subdirectory, the core lives under lib/ and the main executables
          go into syslog-ng/

        * SCL paths are determined relative to ${datadir} instead of
          ${prefix} to make distribution packaging easier.

        * Pass -avoid-version when linking modules.

        * syslog-ng now requires bison 2.4, this is also checked by the
          configure script.

Credits:

I'd like to thank the following people who made this release possible. 
People in no particular order:
	* Péter Gyöngyösi for his patternize work
	* Márton Illés for pdbtool test
	* Róbert Fekete for his feedback on various functions/ideas
	* Csaba Major for listening to my stupid ideas :)
	* Martin Grauel for giving a talk on syslog-ng 3.2 and for his 
	  number of useful comments
	* Bálint Kovács for trying patternize, giving me bugreports 
	  and for his patternize related ideas
	* Péter Czanik for asking distributor maintainers to package 
	  syslog-ng 3.2 and to return feedback on the build process
	* Matthew Hall, Martin Holste, Patrick H. for his patterndb 
	  feedback and their support on the mailing that gave me time to 
	  work on syslog-ng instead of doing syslog-ng related mailing

Hopefully I haven't forgotten anyone. I'd like to open the 3.3 branch 
of syslog-ng now and I'd appreciate if distributions would start adopting 
the 3.2 package. It comes with big build changes, so maintainers
please expect some more time with this release.

I'm trying to fix bugs fast as they appear to get a stable 3.2 by 
the end of this year.

Happy logging!

-- 
Bazsi