[syslog-ng] syslog-ng maintenance changes

[Gergely Nagy]

Hi!

Balazs Scheidler <bazsi at balabit.hu> writes:

> After talking to him in real life, we've decided to make a shift, he
> is going to maintain the 3.3 tree and making releases instead of
> myself. This will make 3.3 maintenance smoother, and free some
> precious time for me, which I'd use to work on the 3.4 features.

I'd like to take this opportunity to outline my plans with regards to
3.3, and provide a short roadmap. There won't be many changes, as 3.3 is
a stable release afterall, and I want to keep it that way. The latest
3.3.5 release was already almost perfect, and by far the best 3.3
release so far, I'd like to make 3.3.6 top that.

As of now, the following items are on the 3.3.6 roadmap:

 [X] systemd enhancements:
     [X] Correctly alias syslog-ng.service to syslog.service
     [X] Teach the system() source about systemd, so configs using
     system() will work on both systemd-enabled systems, and traditional
     ones as well, without change.
     [X] Smooth transition from /dev/log to journal: if systemd is in
     use, and the config uses /dev/log, translate that to
     /run/systemd/journal/syslog. This will go away post-3.4!
     [ ] Include man page and admin guide references in the
     Documentation= section of the unit file.
 [X] Ignore SIGHUP in the supervisor [#143]
 [X] Don't use deprecated glib symbols: a purely cosmetic change, to
     reduce the number of compile-time warnings on modern systems.
 [X] Restore fsync(yes) functionality [#175]
 [X] README in spec, but not in source [#180]
 [ ] Fix unix-dgram's handling of charset decoding errors [#181]
 [ ] Fix spoofed source on Solaris [#178]
 [ ] Fix ivykis-related run-time error on mips64 [#176]

 [#143]: https://bugzilla.balabit.com/show_bug.cgi?id=143
 [#175]: https://bugzilla.balabit.com/show_bug.cgi?id=175
 [#181]: https://bugzilla.balabit.com/show_bug.cgi?id=181
 [#178]: https://bugzilla.balabit.com/show_bug.cgi?id=178
 [#176]: https://bugzilla.balabit.com/show_bug.cgi?id=176
 [#180]: https://bugzilla.balabit.com/show_bug.cgi?id=180

Apart from these, there's one major thing I want to change, which will -
by default - not affect anyone, but I have hopes that it will prove to
be beneficial in the future (and as a side effect, also fixes #176):
starting with syslog-ng 3.3.6, along with the tarball, a patch file will
be provided too, that makes it possible to use upstream ivykis with
syslog-ng, instead of the embedded, forked copy it ships with now.

This means that distributions will be able to compile syslog-ng against
a packaged ivykis, and any bugs found therein, will be easier to fix,
and any improvements made to ivykis will also benefit syslog-ng
immediately.

This also paves the way to switching to upstream ivykis by default at a
later point in time - but that switch is out of the scope of a stable
series, so it can only be done in 3.4 soonest. Nevertheless, an optional
patch to make this easy is a worth the effort, I believe.

And that's all there is, the only remaining question is: when will 3.3.6
land? I'm a firm believer of the Debianesque "when it is ready" school,
so as soon as the list above has all boxes ticked, and there are no new
issues to solve, I'll hit the release button.

I expect that to happen in a couple of weeks, mid-June or so, if all
goes well. That way we might even have 3.3.6 in Debian Wheezy, using
upstream ivykis, which would make me *very* happy.

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