is freshmeat now dead?

I used freshmeat.net -both as an user and a project author- for several years and like the clean and efficient interface. Now, they have revamped the whole thing and I have to admit I personally think they screwed up while doing so.

First of all, a project has a structure that consists of various branches, each of them coming in different versions (see my post on the rsyslog family tree. In the old interface, you had branches and versions, and everyone could clearly see what belonged to where. In the new interface (as I understand it), you have a bunch of links that you can label. So I now have to deal with a flat structure and labels. This is NOT how software grows. And as this no longer is a real-world abstraction, it has become quite complicated to assign meaningful values. Not to mention that the big bunch of links is probably quite confusing to users.

I’ll probably deal with that by removing all but the development branches. Better to have consistent information than to have everything…

I also miss the statistics counters. They provided some good insight into what users where interested in and what effect releases had. Very valuable for me as an author, but also valuable for me as a user, for example, when I want to judge how active a project is. Freshmeat promised (on March, 15th) to bring back statistics “in a few days”, but today (March, 27th), they are still missing. And if they eventually appear and follow the rest of the design paradigm, I am skeptical if there is really value in them.

All in all, I am very dissatisfied. I am sad to have lost a valuable open source resource. So what to do now? Sourceforge again – don’t like that either. Ohloh? Maybe. Probably it’s best to concentrate on our own web resources… But first of all, I’ll wait a couple of days/weeks and hope that freshmeat will become usable again. But please don’t expect too many announcements on freshmeat from me for the time being.

There is also an interesting discussion thread on the new freshmeat design, I suggest to give it a read (you’ll also find that others like it!)

rsyslog “family tree”

I have created a rsyslog “family tree” showcasing how the various branches and versions go together. It is a condensed graph of the git DAG and shows a few feature branches as an example. I personally think it provides a good overview of how rsyslog work progresses (click picture for larger version).


In red is the git master branch, blue are currently supported stable branches. Branch head “v1-stable” is dotted, because it is no longer officially supported. Dashed nodes are versions on feature branches, solid nodes are versions on main branches. Solid lines are direct ancestors, dashed lines indicate that there are some versions in between. Lots of feature branches have not been show. Bug fixes are typically applied to the oldest code experiencing the problem and then merged into the more recent versions, thus the code flow for bug fixes is kind of reverse. This bug fixing code flow is not shown inside the graph.

Note that you can use gitk to create the full DAG from the git archive. The purpose of my effort is to show the relationships that are well-hidden in gitk’s detailled view.

I have written a much more elaborate post about the “evolution of software“, unfortunately, it is available currently only in German (with very questionable results by Google Translate).

Why is there still PRI in a syslog message?

This is the first of a couple of blog posts I intend to do in response to Raffy’s post on syslog-protocol. I am very late, but better now than never. Raffy raised some good points. To some I agree, to some not and for some others it is probably interesting to see why things are as they are.

The bottom line is that this standard – as probably every standard – is a compromise of what could be agreed on by a larger group of people and corporate interests. Reading the IETF mailing list archives will educate much about this process, but I will dig out those interesting entry points into the mass of posts for you.

I originally thought I reply with a single blog post to Raffy. However, this tends to be undoable – every time I intend to start, something bigger and more important comes into my way. So I am now resorting to more granualar answers – hopefully this work.

Enough said, on the the meat. Raffy said:

  • Syslog message facility: Why still keeping this? The only reason that I see people using the facility is to filter messages. There are better ways to do that. Some of the pre-assigned groups are fairly arbitrary and not even really implemented in most OSs. UUCP subsystem? Who is still using that? I guess the reason for keeping it is backwards compatibility? If possible, I would really like this to be gone.
  • Priority calculation: The whole priority field is funky. The priority does not really have any meaning. The order does not imply importance. Why having this at all?

 

And I couldn’t agree more with this. In my personal view, keeping with the old-style facility is a large debt, but it was necessary to make the standard happen. Over time, I have to admit, I even tend to think it was a good idea to stick with this format, it actually eases transition.

Syslog-protocol has a long history. We thought several times we were done, and the first time this happened was in November, 2005. Everything was finalized and then there was a quite unfortunate (or fortunate, as you may say now ;)) IETF meeting. I couldn’t attend (too much effort to travel around the world for a 30-minute meeting…) and many other WG participants also could not.

It took us by surprise that the meeting agreed the standard was far from ready for publishing (read the meeting minutes). The objection raised a very long (and productive, I need to admit) WG maling list discussion. To really understand the spirit of what happened later, it would be useful to read mailing list archives starting with November, 14th.

However, this is lots of stuff, so let me pick out some posts that I find important. The most important fact is that backward compatibility became the WG charter’s top priority (one more post to prove the point). Among others, it was strongly suggested that both the PRI as well as the RFC 3164 timestamp be preserved. Thankfully, I was able to proof that there was no common understanding on the date part in different syslog server (actually, the research showed that nothing but PRI is common among syslogds…). So we went down and decided that PRI must be kept as is – to favor compatibility.

As I said, I did not like the decision at that time and I still do not like the very limited number of facilities that it provides to us (actually, I think facility is mostly useless). However, I have accepted that there is wisdom in trying to remain compatible with existing receivers – we will stick with them for a long time.

So I have to admit that I think it was a good decision to demand PRI begin compatible. With structured data and the other header fields, we do have ways of specifying different “facilities”, that is originating processes. Take this approach: look at facility as a down-level filtering capability. If you have a new syslogd (or write one!) make sure you can filter on all the other rich properties and not just facility.

In essence, I think this is the story why, in 2009, we still have the old-style PRI inside syslog messages…

How Software gets stable…

I have received a couple of questions the past days if this or that rsyslog feature can be introduced into the stable branch soon. So I thought it is time to blog about what makes software stable – and what not…

But let me first start by something apparently unrelated: let me confess that, from time to time, I like to enjoy some good wine (Californian Merlot and Cabernet especially – ask my for my mailing address if you would like to contribute some! ;)). And at some special occasions, I spend way to much money just to get the “old stuff”: those nice wines that have aged in oak barriques. To cut a long story short, those wines are stored in barrels not only for storage, but because the exposure to the oak, as well as some properties of the storage container, interact with the wine and make it taste better. Wikipedia has the full story, and also this interesting quote:

The length of time that a wine spends in the barrel is dependent on the varietal and style of wine that the winemaker wishes to make. The majority of oak flavoring is imparted in the first few months that the wine is in contact with oak but a longer term exposure can affect the wine through the light aeration that the barrel allows which helps to precipitate the phenolic compounds and quickens the aging process of the wine.[8] New World Pinot noir may spend less than a year in oak. Premium Cabernet Sauvignon may spend two years. The very tannic Nebbiolo grape may spend four or more years in oak. High end Rioja producers will sometimes age their wines up to ten years in American oak to get a desired earthy, vanilla character.

Read it again: “High end Rioja producers will sometimes age their wines up to ten years in American oak to get a desired earthy, vanilla character.

So what would the Riojan winemaker probably say if you asked him for a great 2008 wine (we are in early 2009 currently, just for the records)? How about “Be patient, my friend – wait another 9 years, and you can enjoy it!” And what if you begged him you need it now, immediately? “I am sorry, but I can’t accelerate time…“. And if you told him you really, really need it because otherwise you can not close an important business deal? Maybe he says “Listen my friend. Some things simply need time. You can’t hurry them. But if you need to have something that can’t really exist, I can get you a bottle of that wine and label it as ‘Famos Riojan 10-year aged Wine from 2008’ – but we both know what is in the bottle!“. Technically speaking, the winemaker is not even cheating – he claims that the wine is from 2008, and so how can it be aged 10 years? If anyone buys that (today), the onlooker is probably very much in fault.

As a side-note, all too often our society works in that way: someone requests something that is impossible to do, someone begs long enough until someone else cheats, everybody knows – and we all are happy (at least up to the point where the cheat gets us into real trouble… – pick your favorite economic crisis to elaborate).
The moral from the story? Some things need time. And you can’t replace time by anything else. If you want to have the real taste of a wine aged 10 years in oak… you need 10 years.

By now you probably wonder what all of this has to do with software. A lot! Have you ever thought what makes software stable? In closed source, you hopefully have a large testing department that helps you nail down bugs. In open source, you usually do not have many of these folks, but you have something much better: a community of loyal users eager to break their systems with the latest and greatest of what you happen to have thrown together ;)

In either case, you start with a relatively unstable program and with each bug report (assuming you fix it), the software gets more stable. While fixing bugs, however, you may introduce new instabilities. The larger the fix, the larger the risk. So the more you change, the larger the need to re-test and the larger the probability that while one issue is fixed one (or more!) issues have been newly created. For very large fixes, you may even end with a much worse version of the software than you had before.

Thankfully, a patch to fix a bug is usually much smaller than what was fixed. Often, it is just a few lines of code, so the risk to worsen things is low. Why is the patch usually just a few lines long? Simply because you fix some larger thing that usually works quite well. So you need to change some details which were not properly thought out and thus resulted in wrong behavior (if you made a design error, that’s a different story…).

So the more bug reports you get, and the more of them you fix, the more stable a software gets. You may have seen some formal verifications in computer science, but in practice, for most applications, this is the simple truth on how things work.

Now to new features: features are usually the opposite from a bugfix: introducing a new feature tends to be a larger effort, touching much more code and adding code where code never has been ;) If you add new features, chances are great that you introduce new bugs. So with each feature added, you should expect that the stability of your code decreases (and, oh boy, it does!). So how to iron out these newly introduced bugs? Simply wait for bug reports, fix them, wait for more – until you have reached at least a decent level of stability (aka “no new/serious bug reports received for a period of n days, whatever you have n defined to be).

And what if you then introduce a new feature? I guess by now you know: that’ll decrease stability so you need to iterate through the bugfixing process … and so on.

But, hey, we are doing open source. I *love* to add features every day! Umm… I guess my program will never reach a decent level of stability. Bad…

What to do? Taking a long vacation (seducing…) is not a real solution. Who will fix bugs while I am away (shame on me for mentioning this…)? But a pattern appears if you follow this thought: what you need to do to make a program stable is fix bugs for a period of time but refrain from adding new features!

Thanks to git, this can easily be done: you simply create one code branch for a version that shall become stable, and create another branch for the version where you create new features (the development branch). With a bit of git vodoo, you can even import fixes from your stabilizing branch to the development branch. Once you are happy with the stability of your code (in the stabilizing branch), you are ready to declare it to be stable! For that, you’ll probably have a separate branch. Then, you can start the game again: copy the state of your development branch to the stabilizing branch, do not touch that branch except for bug fixes and continue adding new features to the development branch. Iterate this as long as you are interested in your project.

This, in short form, is how rsyslog is created. Currently, there are four main branches, plus a number of utility branches that aid the development of specific features (let’s ignore them in this context here): we have the development (also called “master”) branch which equates to the … yes… development branch from the sample above;). The stabilizing branch is called “beta” in rsyslog terms. Then, we have a v2-stable and a v3-stable branch. Both are actually stable, but v2-is probably even more stable because it has – except for bug fixes – not been touched for many months more. It also has the fewest features, so it is probably the best choice if you are primarily interested in stability and do not need any of the new features. As rsyslog is further developed, we will add extra stable branches (e.g. there will probably be a v4- and v5-stable branch – but we may also no longer maintain v2-stable at this point because nobody uses it any longer [just like dinosaurs are no longer maintained ;)]).

Did you read carefully? Did you get the message? So let me ask:
What makes software stable?

Bug fixes? Testing? Money (yes, yes, please throw at me!)?

REALLY? Let me repeat:
WHAT MAKES SOFTWARE STABLE?

There is only one real ingredient and that is: TIME! Just like good wine, software needs to age. Thankfully, age, for software, is defined in number of different test cases. So money can accelerate aging of software (as some chemistry guru may be able for wine, probably with the same side-effects…). But for the typical open source project, stability simply goes along with the rate at which the community adopts new releases, tests them AND submits bugs, so that the authors can work on fixing broken things.

And what is the moral of the story? Finally, I am coming back to the opening questions: there is nothing but time that make rsyslog stable. So if you ask me to add a feature today, and I do, you can not expect it to be immediately stable – simply because this is not how things work (thanks, btw, for trusting so much in my programming abilities ;)). The new feature needs to go through all the stages, that is it must be applied to the current development build (otherwise we would de-stabilize the current beta, what is not desirable). Then, this is migrated to the stable build over time, where it can finally fully stabilize and, whenever the bug rate seems to justify this, it can move on to the stable build. For rsyslog, this typically means between three to four, sometimes more month are needed before a new feature hits the stable branches. And there is little you can do against that.

“But… hey, I need a stable version of that cool feature now! My manager demands it. Hey, I’ll also pay you for it…” Guess what? I can do the same the winemaker did. Of course, and if you ask really nicely, I can create a v3-stable-cool version for you, which is a version with the cool feature that I have declared immediately stable (btw, it’s mostly the same thing that all others just cal l “the beta”). If that satisfies your boss, I’ll happy to do. But we both know what you have gotten… ;)

Of course, I am exaggerating a bit here: in software, we can somewhat increase the speed of stabilizing by adding testers. Money (and even more motivation) can do that. We can also backport single new features to so-far stable branches (note the fine print!). This reduces the stability a bit, but obviously not as much as for the development version. However, this requires effort (read: time and/or money) and it may be impractical for many features. Some features simply rely on others that were newly introduced in that development version and if you backport the whole bunch of them, you’ll have something as much changed as the development version, but in an environment where the component integration is not as well tested and understood. Of course, some company policies (seem to) force you to do that. If so, the end result is that you have a system that is much less stable than the development version, but has a seemingly “stable” label. Wow, how cool! As the common sense says says: “everyone gets what one asks for” ;)

So what is the bottom line? Good software and good wine has something in common: time to ripen! Think about this the next time to ask me to offer a new feature as part of a stable branch. Its simply impossible. But, of course, you can bribe me to stick that “stable” label onto a mangled-with version…

ISS unter debris hit threat!

In case you have not yet heard it on the twittersphere, here is something you should really look into: there is a so-called “red” threat that the ISS is being hit by debris. The ISS crew is currently closing hatches and preparing to move to the attached Sojuz return vehicle, in case this should be required. The full story is at nasaspaceflight.com. I also strongly recommend to dial in to NASA mission audio. The critical time is 5 minutes around 11:39am CDT.

I think I found the following two interesting links to track the debris and the International space station.

Thankfully, the event is now over and nothing happend (no news is good news :-)).

Here is a picture of the two satellite trackers around the time of the close encounter. Have a look at latidue, longitude and elevation in the trackers.

Platform importance for rsyslog

If you follow my blog or the rsyslog mailing list, you probably already know that rsyslog is available on a number of platforms. Thanks to contributors, rsyslog runs on BSD and is seen on Solaris and HP-UX too. The later two are not real ports yet and each of them has their restrictions. Also, I’d like to see support for AIX, but was not even able yet to obtain a compile platform.

HOWEVER… as much as I desire multi-platform support, it is the truth that rsyslog stems from and is fueled by the Linux community. This is where the major contributions come from and this is also where the major interest originates. Plus, this is the only truly free platform, so it lives up to the same spirit that rsyslog has.

When it comes to putting effort into the project, I have limited resources. Naturally, I put those resources to where they create the most effect. For that reason, most of the development is focused towards Linux (followed by BSD, where there is also an active community). Solaris and friends live mostly in the corporate world and so questions asking for rsyslog on these platforms mostly come from for-profit organizations. And there are very few of these requests. So I can not give them priority, because they do not benefit the project sufficiently large. HOWEVER, if the corporations put some money up and sponsor development, that is definitely in the interest of the project, because it allows us to grow and the sponsorship will probably allow us to do other things as well. Everyone benefits.

Once a platform is implemented, it must be maintained. Obviously, there is little point in orphaning a platform that we already run on. But for platforms with little interest, it is probably not justified to test each and every new release (just think of the testing time required). I’d call those platforms “tier 2” platforms and think I can look at them only in response to a problem report. Of course, we offer rsyslog support contracts and if a sufficiently large number of users decide to purchase these contracts (extremely low numbers today, to phrase it politely) and these purchasers are interested in e.g. Solaris, we will most probably change priorities and all out of sudden Solaris will become “tier 1”. Of course, this may push away some community-requested work, but again I think this is in the overall interest of the project: if we can secure continuous funding, not only from one source (Adiscon), but many, we can be much more sure we can implement more and more cool things in the future.

I hope this clarifies my position on the importance of the various platforms for rsyslog and how I will handle them.

Oh, and one final note: if a platform requires me to even purchase hardware (Solaris/Sparc for example), I will not do that unless someone donates a machine (NOT LEND it, but donate, so that at least for the next three years I can ensure maintaining rsyslog on it – a virtual machine, of course, is sufficient if you happen to have some inside a cloud ;)). It would be just plainly silly to put real money at supporting a community that does not contribute back ;)

rsyslog video tutorials…

I started thinking about video tutorials a few days ago. Videos are cool and more and more people use them. So why not create a couple of them for rsyslog?

The idea is simple and I think it will work equally well for teaching both conceptual topics as well as practical “how to” types of problems. The later probably works even better…

I could investigate, design and build my tutorial in a perfect way. The result would obviously be very useful and perfect – but most probably there never would be any result due to time constraints and priorities. With this on my mind, I created a very first trial tutorial this morning, all in all in less than an hour. It took me some more minutes to get it up on the web site, but this effort will never again be required.

The question this trial shall answer is: is it possible to create something useful (not perfect) in little time? My personal feeling is mixed. I think one notices quickly that the material is not as much organized as you would expect from a talk. Also, some additional slides would definitely have enhanced the usefulness – but also increased production time very much. On the other hand, I think some information is conveyed by the presentation. And, even better, information that you can not obtain with reasonable effort from any other place.

So: is it useful or not? What could improve the usefulness without causing a large increase in production time? Does it make sense to create sub-optimal content but be able to create it as it can quickly be done? If so, which other topics would you like to see covered?

Please have a look at the rsyslog message flow video tutorial and let me know your thoughts!

rsyslog and solaris

This week, I had the opportunity to work a bit on rsyslog on Solaris. Most importantly, I could set up a compile and test environment (*not* that easy if you don’t know your way around Solaris…) and have integrated those patches that folks have sent over time (unfortunately I have lost many of the contributor names, so if you are among them please let me know for proper credits!).

I was able to integrate those patches and make sure that they don’t break the linux build (I am still a bit in the verification process, but it looks good). I have created a solaris branch in git and will in the future keep solaris-specific additions in that branch. I will merge that branch back into the master branches every time I am confident enough that it doesn’t break anything in the main stream build.

I was satisfied to see that not that many changes were required for a Solaris build. So the initial effort, some month ago, seems to have paid well. I have seen that the solaris git branch compiles, but I have not done any serious testing on Solaris. Still, I am short on time and I have to admit I have spent more time on it this week than I should. So testing is off-limits for now…

However, I got some good impression on what it takes to make rsyslog really run on Solaris. First of all, even gcc4 does not provide the atomic instructions that it is used to provide on Linux. This case is not really handled in the code, so the end result is that the binary will be racy. I guess it will run, but it will have subtle issues on high-volume log servers and/or serves that run asynchronous action queues. Especially if the later is used, I’d expect rsyslogd to segfault every now and then (but without async actions it should not be that bad, at least I think).

There also still does no kernel input plugin exist (or an imklog driver). I also guess there may be issues with the local log socket. I’d still caution everybody to be very, very careful when experimenting with the local log socket. I remember earlier testing where rsyslogd simply destroyed the socket but never was able to re-create it. Some other tweaks are probably required to core and runtime files. Some compiler messages point into that direction (and part of that may even be nasty).

I have compiled only the bare essentials, without TLS, database drivers or anything else fancy. I expect some mild to moderate problems with them, too.

So in short, the current code base is probably be used to run a relatively stable syslog relay or file-only receiver. I wouldn’t put it in too much production, though. For folks interested in rsyslog on Solaris, we now at least have a version again that can be build and serve as a basis for extension. I am glad I could do that.

As a side-note, I am still looking for sponsors of a full rsyslog Solaris porting effort. If you would like to sponsor (or know someone who does), just mail me and I’ll help settle the dirty details ;)

I hope this update – and the progress made – on rsyslog on Solaris is useful for a couple of folks.

cologne municipal archive building collapsed


In Cologne, Germany, the municipal archive collapsed today at around 2pm. People believed to be trapped in building. It is feared that lives have been lost (according to Cologne newspaper Express, no known death at this time [7:10p], but 9 people missed [5:40p]). It was a typical business day and there were both clerks as well as customers inside the building. However, no official statement yet exists. According to Reuters (4:55p), official said at least one person injured, possibly others trapped in collapsed building.

As some people told German media, there have been subway construction works close to the collapsed buildings. Sources say subway workers ran out of the construction site and yelled. That lead to some people fleeing the building. According to one eyewitness, some other, smaller buildings have also collapsed in the mean time (4:40p). The witness says the road sag. According to cologne radio station WDR, the building actually collapsed into a newly-build subway tunnel. The road shall be wide open, also collapsed into it (~5p).

While this is speculation, it looks like the subway construction seems to have caused shifts of earth masses, which ultimately resulted in the collapse of the building. Cologne subway operator KVB says there were no larger construction work at this moment below the building. If that is true, it may probably be the result of a larger chain of events (and hopefully the last in that chain…).

On German radio station SWR3, a neighbor said that a close-by church was close to collapese due to subway work. This situation seems to have been solved in the mean time.

Last week, the site was part of the large cologne carnival parade. One can not imaging what might have been caused if the collapse had happened at that time.

Some picture of the site before the incident:

The webcam I quote below seems to have been right inside the collapsed building (speculation on my part). I was able to connect to the web cam server five times now, the picture is always the one below. I guess that was the last picture the webcam ever made. If so, the collapse was closely after 2:20pm:

Google maps for orientation (you see it happend right in a densly populated area):

View Larger Map

View Larger Map

The municipal archives was not only a historical building, it also held important historical documents (see description below). I guess that many of these documents have been lost, but hope that many can be recovered. According to Cologne’s official web site, it was one of the largest municipal archives in Germany, holding original documents from over thousand years of history. As it looks, there seem to have not been any roman artifacts inside the building.

Correction: the building itself was not historical, it was erected in 1971. There is a picture of it available at the German news site Spiegel online (you may need to go back and forth as they add pictures – this does not look like a permanent link).

Links:

I stop compiling news now (6:20p), nothing really new appeared the past hour. I guess the situation must clear up. Mainstream media will probably have good coverage tomorrow. If you hear anything interesting, please let me know (e.g. by commenting).

rsyslog doc – state of the art…

Most people agree that rsyslog is a decent and useful piece of software. However, most people (including me) also agree that the rsyslog documentation is, ahem, sub-optimal.

When I code, I always think “I’ll do the doc soon”. But when “soon” arrives, something else is in the way. Yet another (justified) feature request, articles and other projects (yes, they exist ;)). At least I try to convey the important concepts and backgrounds here in the blog, but you have a hard time if you intend to extract a specific feature from the blog. So: the doc is in a bad shape.

I just got an offer from an volunteer who would like to help with the doc. That may even be the start of a rsyslog doc team. In any case, that’s a fantastic opportunity. First of all, more doc means more and happier users. Secondly, I think it is very useful when someone other than me writes user doc. I can’t even envision the questions that a regular user may ask, and this is a problem for any manual I write.

I hope this collaboration manifests. In order to aid it, let me briefly describe what currently exists: www.rsyslog.com is driven by Postnuke for various reasons, the most important one that I have a postnuke wiz at hand, so I do not need to dig in any dirty details if I need something extra ;) Postnuke is a CMS, so dynamic content can be added and is easy to edit by anyone else. So far, we use the web site itself primarily for news announcements.

The real doc set is kept as HTML. We use a Postnuke module to integrate that static html into the CMS. The HTML doc set exists only once, right inside the rsyslog git tree. When I make changes, they automatically go into git, go into the tarball and I also copy them over to the web site. All of this is without any effort, which is good. The bottom line is that the HTML doc set needs to be modified by patches or me pulling from someone else’s git archive (both of which I will happily do). I think it is good to have the html pages available in the tarball, previous discussion on the rsyslog mailing list showed that package maintainers think so, too.

There exists two man pages. They are extremely bad. They need to be hand-synced with the html pages and I almost always forget to do so. Man pages do not go onto the web (besides some very old copies I produced via a clumsy way). But the live in git and the tarball, too.

A partial effort was done to internationalize the doc set, based on the usage of docbook. I think this is a good approach and the work done so far is kept in the rsyslog docbook branch. However, the approach currently focuses on the man pages. I do not know if it will work for the HTML doc, too.

I find docbook a very interesting concept, but the learning curve is steep. I simply had not enough time yet to dig deeply into it to start any serious work with it (html and LaTeX are still king for me ;)).

We have also a few places of obviously user-contributed content, the most important one being the rsyslog wiki. It contains many useful things, among others config samples. The bad thing about the wiki is that there is only a single one. So it probably is not the place to describe things that are very version dependent. Or is it and I have just the wrong approach – correct me!

Worth mentioning is also the rsyslog knowledge base, which primarily focuses dynamic content and discussions. But the search function is a very useful tool. Also, part of the larger knowledge base is devoted to gather information on how to configure syslog devices, how to best react to messages and how to consolidate e.g. Windows events. This obviously is not direct rsyslog documentation, but I hope it is useful and will continue to grow even more useful.

Finally, there is the mailing list and most importantly the mailing list archive. While this is definitely not considered a documentation resource, the archive has a lot of valuable information and it may even be a starting point for creating “real” doc.

I hope this is a good and complete wrap-up of the doc situation. If I have forgotten anything or you’d like to tell me your thoughts: just use the comment function! :)