[Xymon] Update on 4.4 (Alpha1 release)

[J.C. Cleaver]

Hello all! Just wanted to update everyone on a few things.

Going through the 4.x codebase re-familiarizing myself again with the
state of everything, I recalled that I'd actually built a release artifact
before development was paused, including a testing RPM that has actually
been running unbeknownst on a VM for quite a while. Unfortunately, while
validating that compiles from source worked I ran into what looked like
showstopper bugs. These weren't showing up in the package, so I had to
pore through a lot more code* than I expected to try to figure out where
the package was accidentally fixing it.

(*message-sending code, which changes a lot in 4.4 to support compression,
TLS, HTTP, and size-prefixed messages)

Fortunately, it ended up being a relatively simple issue (isn't it
always?), with easy-enough validation and workaround (given below).
Although more fixes could be put in (and I'm sure will be needed!), I
believe there's some benefit to having a stable starting point using a
build artifact from 2019.

As a result, I'm pleased to announce the first alpha for Xymon 4.4! As
this is an alpha release, this is absolutely NOT suitable for production
use and is intended mainly for smoketesting by source users. (And I expect
there will be smoke.) The release tarball is available now at:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/xymon/files/Xymon/4.4-alpha/xymon-4.4-alpha1.tar.gz


Major improvements are too many to list here but are noted in the Changes
and RELEASENOTES files. README documents for compression, TLS, and IPv6
are in progress.

Some of the changes and improvements other than TLS support have been in
the Terabithia packages (to some extent) for a while, so there will be
less of a delta for those users to this alpha.

For the moment, I'd like to focus on source tarball users and others
running xymon from scratch to help fix underlying issues and any smoketest
failures, which I expect may crop up particularly on untested non-Linux
platforms. Once the lower-hanging fruit is fixed and more patches are
upstreamed and cleaned up, I'll release an alpha2 release at which point
packages may be released to help with testing iteration and downstream
distributors.

Please flag bug reports or patches as related to "alpha1" in the subject
line to help keep things clear.


Thank you to everyone in the community for remaining part of it -- and
xymon users! -- during this interregnum. Restarting development has been a
process, but I'm glad to take this important first step to our next
release.


Regards,
-jc



*** KNOWN ISSUES -- IMPORTANT ***

The configure script is likely setting XYMONHOME/XYMONCLIENTHOME and
XYMSRV/XYMSERVERS/XYMONSERVERS incorrectly, which will prevent xymonlaunch
from correctly launching anything. Double check the xymon environment
files (xymonserver/xymonclient.cfg) before starting either the server or
client.

The tools/xymon-client.default and tools/xymonlaunch files may be placed
into /etc/{sysconfig,default}/{xymon-client,xymonlaunch} to more easily
set $XYMONSERVERS

Revealed by the above issue is a bug causing a crash in the client (or
anywhere) when given an empty string as the destination argument (instead
of 0, 127.0.0.1 or no variable set). Don't do this --> [ xymon '' "ping" ]

The client and logfetch binary may be being re-compiled during 'make install'

Compilation may fail if c-ares and at least one compression library is not
present (lzo/lz4/zlib are all options). xxHash libraries are also highly
recommended as the plan is for xxhash to replace md5 for checksumming
functionality. libtirpc may be necessary on some platforms, and it's
possible the build code is still expecting traditional (Sun) RPC