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syslog-ng 3.1 status

Like I announced in one of my previous posts, towards the syslog-ng OSE 4.0 release I'm going to make smaller, short-term supported releases. The first of these, called syslog-ng 3.1 is nearing completion, and thus a status report is due.

Here's the original plan (quoting the roadmap page here):
  • support tags for syslog messages: each message can be marked with one or more tags, then apply filtering based on tags
  • patterndb: add tag support
  • patterndb: v2 database format support
  • patterndb: add parsers for IPv6 addresses and hex numbers
  • converge macros in templates and name-value pairs even more (right now it is not possible to use any macro in match())

I've just pushed out another set of updates to our git repository, which:
  • adds tag support: a new tags() filter and a tags() option for all sources and a builtin logic to assign the syslog-ng source name as a tag (in the format: .source.)
  • adds support for patterndb v2 and a newly introduced but compatible v3 format
  • adds "pdbtool" a new utility for managing patterndb files (not yet complete)
  • a couple of new parsers (IPv6, ANYSTRING, FLOAT)
The last item in the roadmap is not yet addressed, in fact I haven't even started it yet. I'm thinking about leaving that out altogether in order to have 3.1 released as soon as possible. If you have an opinion about that please don't hesitate to post it here on the mailing list.

If you are experimenting with patterndb you are advised to use the 3.1 branch as development happens here. Of course if we find something that affects our current stable 3.0, I'm backporting the fix, but since 3.0 is stable, I'm only backporting bugfixes and not new functionality.

If you are interested you can get the sources via git, or if you prefer a tarball, just drop me an email.

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