release window for rsyslog 7.6

There have been a couple of questions when rsyslog’s next stable release (7.6) will be released.

Originally, the idea was to have this done by the end of this year, which essentially means end of November. Unfortunately, this needs to be pushed into early January 2014. The reason is code quality.

In October, we discovered a larger regression and inconsistency in regard to the new variable support in rsyslog. As it turned out, the only good choice was to seriously refactor the code handling variables and message properties. Unfortunately, such a larger refactoring also means bug potential, so I don’t feel well to release 7.6 stable with just two weeks of testing on this refactored code. Looking forward, a release around mid-December sounds doable, but this means we’ll hit the holiday break with a brand-new stable release. This is something that I definitely want to avoid. As such, the current plan is to do the release shortly after the holiday break.

In order to keep this release window, I will also avoid larger modifications to the code base. That doesn’t mean things like better support for impstats support in omelasticsearch, but it may mean that the updated imfile code will probably not be merged into v7, at least not now.

Depending on how things work out with rsyslog v8, I will do another 7.7 devel series for less intrusive enhancements or move directly to v8 only. This will be also be decided around January 2014, when we hopefully got enough feedback on v8.