On 1/15/26 09:43, Nicola wrote:
Hi, I am willing to help (unfortunately my C skills are at the "hello world" level, from university studies).
Yeah, I'm in a similar position. I don't have a lot of C experience, but I have very broad skills across a bunch of languages and networking/sysadmin. We have a lot of tools at our disposal to help us though, and that giant "Fix a large number of GCC build warnings and issues (Tom Schmidt, with Ralph Mitchell)" commit definitely helps clean up the codebase.
It would probably help if we try to make the effort of forcing warnings to be errors so we can catch anti-patterns quickly. I'm not sure how much more work will be required to achieve this, but I'll look into it.
I think getting this migration announced would be good as well because it might attract additional contributors with the barriers being lowered a lot now.
Some quick wins might include small quality of life changes like improving the default web design/templates.
I'm also very curious about how many users out there rely on it for some of these legacy Unix systems (AIX, HPUX, etc) because if we get some folks interested in doing things like rewriting xymonnet, xymonping, etc in Rust I don't want to squash that enthusiasm, but we have to be sure it's still possible to target those platforms and I haven't really investigated that. I just know Rust currently cannot target all the architectures C can.
- enable github actions if anyone has experience to publish releases when a new tag is submitted
Not sure if this is really necessary as a tag and a release on Github will provide links to the source tarballs for us, but CI/CD production of RPMs or DEBs would be useful if it's not too much trouble.
- either backport the needful from 4.4alpha or start testing fixes in there
We might have to rely on some advice from Henrik and JC here to see if this is worth pursuing at this time. I'd definitely like to understand what the overall architecture plan was for supporting IPv6 because there are a lot of assumptions about IPv4 in this project -- e.g., the addresses in the hosts file and its interaction with the "testip" setting.
If we're ever to rearchitect xymonnet I think it would be excellent if we could just rely on libcurl because it has support for nearly everything we would want to test (HTTP/HTTPS/IMAP/POP/SMTP/LDAP...) and it wouldn't require custom scripts to test things like the TLS upgrade certificate on SMTP port 25; our tests would actually speak the real protocols!
Anyway I'm droning on enough. As you can tell there's so much potential for Xymon. We *can* modernize it.
Mark