rsyslog version numbering change

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.