News

For the past couple of years, rsyslog made scheduled releases every 6 weeks. We now changed this slightly to make version numbers easier to understand.

Remember, rsyslog versions are called 8.<yy><mm>.0, so the April 2020 release is 8.2004.0. When we release very six weeks, we get odd and even month numbers and, even more confusing, we sometimes seem to “skip” a month while at other times it looks like we craft a scheduled stable “every month”. To avoid this type of confusion, we have now decided to release every two month, and do that on even month.

We will usually try to release in the second half of the given month. However, we will no longer tell the exact target date. We need some flexibility here to avoid targeting “bad release periods”. As a concrete example, we will probably never do a December release during the holiday period. As such, December releases are more likely to happen in the first half of the month, which should give admins also some time to do all of their internal testing work ahead of the holidays.

We originally used the six week schedule to provide a balance between frequent bug fixes and not too frequent releases. With the appearance of daily stable releases a longer release cycle is no more a real concern. Everybody in need of a fix not yet present in the scheduled stable can just switch to the daily stable as needed. Remember that both are stable versions. The daily stable is often more stable as it contains the latest fixes.

Rsyslog used a version number scheme of

8.<real-version>.0

where we incremented <real-version> every 6 weeks with each release. The 8 and 0 are constant (well, the 0 could change to 1 with a very important patch, but in practice we have only done this once).

While this scheme has worked pretty well since we introduced it, we often see people not understanding that there is really a big difference between 8.24 and e.g. 8.40. Followind recent trends in software versioning, we  will make more clear how old a version really is. Begining with today’s release, we change the version number slightly  to

8.yymm.0

where yy is the two-digit year and mm the two-digit month of the release date. We release every 6 weeks, so we will never have two releases within the same month.

So while you expected 8.41.0, you will now get 8.1901.0. To make things even more clear, rsyslog visible version output will be even more up to the point: rsyslog -v will now report “8.1901.0 (aka 2019.01)“.

Rainer Gerhards’ blog has more details on why we did this change and how we came to the new system.