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plugins branch updated

Since the last post, I could hack a couple of hours on the plugins branch, which now compiles. The plugin framework is capable for supporting a quite important core functionality: all socket like sources/destinations are now found in an external plugin called "afsocket".

The reason I've started with afsocket is to make syslog-ng a bit less dependant on OpenSSL. A couple of distributions didn't include syslog-ng 3.0 in their current releases, because it uses OpenSSL from /usr, while syslog-ng should remain in the root directory.

By separating afsocket from the syslog-ng core, I can compile afsocket with and without TLS support, which can be put into separate packages. Thus syslog-ng can operate without OpenSSL.

And the same plugin framework will enable me to create a wide variety of plugins. My ideas:
  • Plugins for all syslog-ng components (source, destination, filter, rewrite, parser)
  • Python scriptability (a simple correllation engine in Python?)
  • macro transformation functions, for example: $(stripslashes $macro), usable anywhere in templates and stripslashes a plugin that is invoked whenever such an expansion occurs
  • Hooks for transforming the log message as it enters syslog-ng (to fix parsing errors for example),
Do you have other ideas? Please post them as comments or as emails to the mailing list.

Again, this functionality is experimental, and I'm still going to rebase the current code and will probably be integrated to syslog-ng 3.2. I got to release 3.1 final first though. :)
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