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Syslog-ng 2.0.0 release date

It was just a week or two ago when someone asked me about the planned release date of syslog-ng 2.0.0, the first stable release of the third incarnation of syslog-ng. Probably I did not even respond to the email as I did not know the answer. "When it's ready" is an answer users do not usually perceive very well.

It is very difficult to judge when a rewrite of such a critical software package is stable enough for production use: I wrote both functional and unit tests, used syslog-ng on my laptop for over a year now, but as I currently lack a system were non-production code can be uploaded, syslog-ng was drifting slowly in the stabilization process: whenever someone reported a bug, I fixed it.

So the release date in the current state is determined by the syslog-ng user community and not me. IF there's certain confidence that a pile of code runs fine, it can be tagged stable and everyone can be happy. If there is no feedback, an optimist might think that everything is going fine, the pessimist would say that nobody is using the product.

My point is that positive feedback is _VERY_ important, it is an indication that people are using the code, but have no problems.

syslog-ng 1.9.x is currently in feature freeze, I don't plan to do anything that threatens stability, but this also means that people waiting for things like message rewrite capabilities need to wait until syslog-ng 2.0.0 is out of the door. And the key to that is YOUR participation: download the latest release, try it and report back. Even, if it works. Especially if you are not running Debian, which I happen to run on my notebook.

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