On Sat, May 30, 2026 at 6:18 AM Bruno Manzoni <bruno.manzoni@ubi-network.ch> wrote:

Hi Josh,
There's already a first take on this in the xymon-problems repo.
See the documentation issue: https://github.com/xymon-monitoring/xymon-problems/issues/8

It's not new work: most of it was written back in 2023 and extracted from the mailing-list discussions
I've just added a few things I came across since. So it may well be inaccurate or out of date.
So treat it as a starting point, not a final answer.

Have a look and see what you think and if it answers some of your questions.
Happy to help with any other questions (if I am able to), and if you'd like to change or add anything: I'll gladly help make it happen !

Bruno

Le 29.05.2026 à 17:36, Josh Luthman a écrit :

Where do we want all of the documentation to end up?

On Thu, May 28, 2026 at 8:26 AM Ralph M <ralphmitchell@gmail.com> wrote:

Were you thinking of deadcat.net for plugins and things?? I don't know what happened to that, but there's another site called xymonton:

https://wiki.xymonton.org/doku.php/addons

Ralph Mitchell

On Thu, May 28, 2026, 8:12 AM Nicola <canne74@gmail.com> wrote:

My 2c on the next steps.

I think we should move the IPv6 changes to a further version (5.0?) while using 4.4 as the "dropping compatibility" release to modernize the codebase and ease the maintenance.

In the 4.4.x we could incorporate the encrypted/authenticated communication, which I think is a less impacting change.

Reviving something like sleepycat (if I remember correctly the name), or a repo of useful plugins for particular monitoring types could be useful.

Sorry for being not much active recently (life and work impacted my available time)

Nicola

Il giorno gio 28 mag 2026 alle ore 08:56 Bruno Manzoni via Xymon <xymon@xymon.com> ha scritto:

Hi all,

First of all, many thanks to everyone involved in the new Xymon organization and the recent work around the project. A lot of effort has clearly gone into modernizing and stabilizing the codebase while still preserving the spirit and simplicity of Xymon.

1. The new governance model is a very positive step for the project:

The fact that at least two people are now involved in validating and merging changes gives much more legitimacy and long-term stability to the project. It certainly slows things down a bit, but for infrastructure software this is probably the correct tradeoff. It reduces the risk of unilateral decisions and helps keep the technical direction coherent.

2. The modernization effort is also going in the right direction.

One major goal of the new organization is bringing Xymon back to a stable and maintainable upstream state, while progressively reintegrating improvements that historically existed only in downstream FreeBSD and Debian repositories (and some in the 4.4 alpha branch).

The work achieved so far in this direction is very encouraging. Several important steps have already been achieved:
- GitHub Actions now automatically builds and validates Xymon across multiple platforms,
- many Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, and pkgsrc portability and build issues were fixed upstream,
- parser cleanup and hardening improved robustness,
- several memory leaks and stability issues were corrected.
As many changes have already been completed, the project is progressively moving toward a new “ready to release” phase, with a growing number of downstream fixes already consolidated upstream, even if the work is not fully completed yet. It may be better to iterate additional fixes in future releases instead of trying to consolidate everything at once.

This first release will also impact Roland and Mark as Debian and FreeBSD maintainers, so it should happen when they feel ready, as they will also need to prepare and publish updated versions on their side.

Keeping the current focus on reducing historical technical debt and reintegrating long-standing downstream work upstream still appears to be the correct priority for now.

3. That said, there are still some weak points:
- documentation is still fragmented between SourceForge, mailing lists, distro patches, wiki pages, and GitHub discussions,
- the maintainer pool is still relatively small, which can slow reviews and create some continuity risk,
- and the project still lacks a clearly centralized long-term roadmap defining modernization priorities and release direction.

Overall though, the direction feels healthy, pragmatic, and technically credible.

4. It would be very interesting to hear what you think as well:
- What could still be improved?
- What is currently missing?
- How could more people become involved?
- And what should the priorities be for the next phases of the project?

Bruno

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