I initially sent this message only to the mailing list. But now I think it make sense to reproduce it here. So there we go:
I am working on the modular structure of rsyslog v3. I am currently revisiting gss-api support. I notice that with the current omfwd, it will be extremely hard to separate gss-api support into its own module. Doing so will break backward compatibility to the configuration file.
GSS-API has been out only for a few days, and mostly over the holiday period. So it is much less of a concern if we introduce now some changes that will case rsyslog.conf format modifications. Much less trouble than when we release v2, a release expected to be in wide use for at least half a year, if not much longer. V2 released with the current syntax would require me to do some tricks in v3 to keep compatibility. Quite complex.
So I decided to create a omgssapi for v3 and extract the gss-api code from omfwd. It looks like this can be done without too much code duplication. There will be some duplicate code, but it will shrink as v3 continues to be developed. Once I have a good working version, which I expect very soon, I will backport that to the v1/2 source tree. I’ll then do a new v1 release with a slightly incompatible gss-api config file syntax. After this is out for a few days, I hope I can than finally push out that version as v2.
I hope this is a good decision. I think it will save us major future trouble at the expense of a relatively slight disturbance in the late v1 timeline. I guess most user’s won’t even notice there is a change.
As always, Feedback is appreciated.