[Xymon] Update on 4.4 (Alpha1 release)

[J.C. Cleaver]

On Thu, September 21, 2023 02:32, Axel Beckert wrote:
> Hi,

>
> 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?
>

Checking back, this appears to be an oversight of mine, yeah. I imported
the base file
https://sourceforge.net/p/xymon/code/8119/log/?path=/branches/4.x-master/Changes
but didn't bring the entries for updates when forward-porting 4.3.x fixes
like https://sourceforge.net/p/xymon/code/8091/

They are there, though. I'll bring that up to date.


> 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.

Oi. Yeah, I remember seeing this push a while back in the Fedora side.
Deprecation has come first
(https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/PcreDeprecation ) and removal will
be in a release or two.

>
> 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
>
> :-/
>

Looking through what API guides there are, I'm not sure there's a great
way to wrap these with flag defines, unfortunately.


> 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.

This will be a bit ugly, but does need to be done
 and probably should be
considered a blocker for a final 4.4 release. xymond_client, rrd, and
report/display routines look to make up the bulk of the code in question,
but there's a lot of it.

Fortunately, none of this code seems to have changed between 4.3 and 4.x
although some of the configure/Makefile lines have. That means it should
be easier to test out this change in isolation there and then apply to 4.x
without much separate breakage going on.


Since the client doesn't require PCRE at all except for "local" mode where
the clientlog is parsed by xymond_client, it might be helpful (if you're
not doing that already) to separate this and its configs into a separate
"xymon-client-local" package, that way at least the dependency can be
removed from the main client package.


-jc