[syslog-ng] Bugfix releases?

[Gergely Bodnár]

Hello,

There are two perspectives to discuss here: syslog-ng as a project and
Balabit as a commercial organization. It is sometimes difficult to separate
the two, but we make a continuous effort to ensure that Balabit does not
have any exclusive rights to the syslog-ng project: We use a licensing that
is symmetric, we don’t use CLAs & we invest in a development infrastructure
that is independent from our internal resources.

Although Balabit is employing the original syslog-ng developers, it is only
one member of the community.

Let me answer your question concerning maintenance releases from the
Balabit company perspective.

In the past year we have started to invest more company resources to help
the Open Source community and improve syslog-ng.

   1.

   Our commercial offering is not a fork anymore, it is actually based on
   the latest syslog-ng release. This means that we work upstream first.
   (bugfixes, features, etc.)
   2.

   We moved portions of our QA infrastructure to the cloud so it is
   improving the stability of the OSE codebase too.
   3.

   We seeked contacts with our fellow distro maintainers to improve
   collaboration


When investing into a project, Balabit as an organization should and has to
decide its priorities, the same ways that any other entity can do the same
in the syslog-ng project. We had to make a decision which part of the
product should we improve and we have chosen to make syslog-ng a
fast-developing product: speed up new features, merge more pull requests,
fix more bugs, make automated testing more robust and release more often.
We are competing with technologies that are fast moving, supporting more
use-cases and we have to be better than they are.

Along with this decision we also had to let the maintenance versions go.
While we understand it is important for some of our users. We’re
encouraging the distro package maintainers to apply the necessary patches
to their packages and we’re  helping them if they get stuck. Or if a distro
bug is filed upstream us which is already fixed we’ll help finding the
appropriate patch. We would even be willing to help someone stepping up
into this maintenance role to help synchronize distro packages. We just
don’t want to do the releases and the corresponding QA that maintenance
releases would bring.

Also, we firmly believe that the rolling releases that we started to do
improves both velocity and quality on the long term. Automatic tests run on
all pull requests submitted via github (unit and end-to-end testing alike).
We base our supported commercial offering on the very same, solid open
source base. And we do our releases every 2 months, first an Open Source
and then a Premium Edition.

These changes however are part of a journey, we would not stop at this
point to increase our investment even further to help our community: we’re
currently in progress of creating a fresh new website to provide more
useful content, like explanation of use-cases, blog posts, webinars and
binary packages.

Cheers,

Gergely


On Tue, Aug 22, 2017 at 3:42 PM Fabien Wernli <wernli at in2p3.fr> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> While I'm very happy with the current rapid development cycle of syslog-ng,
> I can't stop wondering: what happened to bugfix releases?
>
> The quality of the releases is very high indeed, but regressions still
> appear now
> and then, and some users (not us) prefer the safe approach of sticking to
> one major release, and applying only bug fix releases. I think these people
> may have a hard time nowadays.
>
> What's the mailing-list reader's opinion on that?
>
> Cheers
>
>
> ______________________________________________________________________________
> Member info: https://lists.balabit.hu/mailman/listinfo/syslog-ng
> Documentation:
> http://www.balabit.com/support/documentation/?product=syslog-ng
> FAQ: http://www.balabit.com/wiki/syslog-ng-faq
>
> --

*Gergely Bodnar* | syslog-ng Product Owner
gergely.bodnar at balabit.com
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