[Xymon] Update on 4.4 (Alpha1 release)

[Axel Beckert]

Hi,

On Wed, Sep 20, 2023 at 01:37:50PM -0700, J.C. Cleaver wrote:
> As a result, I'm pleased to announce the first alpha for Xymon 4.4!

Yep, noticed with great joy on SF a few days ago!

> As this is an alpha release, this is absolutely NOT suitable for
> production use and is intended mainly for smoketesting by source
> users.

I plan to upload it to Debian Experimental soon-ish. I'm currently on
sick leave, so not very active on the free software front either, but
will take care once I feel better again.

So far I came until checking which Debian patches need updating, but
haven't been able to update them yet.

> 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.

Especially the announcement of the latter two were received with great
happiness by my coworkers.

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

A question I have been wondering about 4.4a1:

4.4a1's changelog bumps directly from 4.3.27 to 4.4a1. Are the changes
from 4.3.28, 4.3.29 and 4.3.30 included in 4.4a1, too?

And there's one other thing which I hoped for in this alpha release
but didn't seem present: It's the move away from PCRE1 (aka libpcre3
in Debian and Ubuntu) to PCRE2 (aka libpcre2 in Debian and Ubuntu).

This is kinda urgent as Xymon already has been kicked out of Debian
Testing for not supporting PCRE2 a month or two ago. Most
distributions are currently trying to get rid of PCRE1. (Actually
Ubuntu and Debian for years, but this release cycle, they unsheathe.

Some details on this:

Old (long deprecated, but currently used) PCRE1 API:
https://www.pcre.org/original/doc/html/

New/current PCRE2 API to migrate to: 
https://www.pcre.org/current/doc/html/

Bug report in Debian about it:
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=999921

Context about Debian's transition (actually seems to have been planned
for an release earlier):
https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2021/11/msg00176.html

Unfortunately despite PCRE2 is there for nearly a decade, there's
still no migration guide, just hints from other project's patches:
https://github.com/PCRE2Project/pcre2/issues/51

:-/

I (and probably most who use packages coming from Linux distributions)
would be happy if this nevertheless could fixed in at least in the 4.4
branch, but wouldn't mind a patch set for the 4.3 stable branch either
unless 4.4 is considered stable (or at least usable in production)
within a year, i.e. in time for Debian's next stable release.

> 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.

Thanks for restarting developement again! Given how often we see
production or setup questions here on the list, there seem quite some
organisations relying on Xymon. And TLS and IPv6 gets more and more
important.

I myself can speak for at least for my workplace (2 Xymon servers),
the Linux User Group Switzerland (1 Xymon server) and my private
infrastructure (2 Xymon servers).

Where TLS and/or IPv6 is needed, I so far use 4.3 with an
stunnel-based TLS tunnel (https://www.stunnel.org/, which is dualstack
by default and hence provides IPv6 for free, too), usually on port
1983. Works, but stunnel occasionally crashes making the hosts
submitting via it purple after a while, so it's usually obvious what
happened.

		Kind regards, Axel
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