Hi all,

A short status of the project, and a proposal for the 4.3.31 release. The wiki now has a page of activity numbers, regenerated monthly:

https://xymon-monitoring.github.io/xymon-wiki/about/project-activity/

It shows review is the bottleneck: 81 pull requests wait for an approval, 41 of them for over a month, and four people do 80% of the reviewing. Anyone may review, no membership needed; running a change on your own system and reporting what it did is a review too.

Getting a change through is hard, and a pull request with more than a few lines of code hardly moves at all. Many of them are not new ideas: they port fixes that have lived for years in the Debian, Terabithia or devel trees, or sort out build and packaging problems, which nobody enjoys reading. To help with that we put three things in place:

- a regression test suite, run on every pull request across 47 platform lanes, so a reviewer starts from "it builds and passes everywhere";

- a pre-review at the end of every pull request: what the author checked, how, the result, and what is left for the approver, so you read what is left rather than the whole change. Rules in CONTRIBUTING.md;

- an experimental release, just done: xymon-experimental merges the open pull requests of a milestone on main daily, runs the lanes, and tags a preview when they pass. 4.3.31-preview2 holds the seven still open on 4.3.31 (#349, #428, #579, #646, #682, #684, #687) and passed all 47.

The release page says what is in it and where to report what you find; the repository README says how a preview is made and built:

https://github.com/xymon-monitoring/xymon-experimental/releases/tag/preview-4.3.31-2
https://github.com/xymon-monitoring/xymon-experimental#previews

The tarball, with its sha256 beside it on the release page:
https://github.com/xymon-monitoring/xymon-experimental/releases/download/preview-4.3.31-2/xymon-4.3.31-preview2.tar.gz

The install instructions are in the tarball itself, docs/install.html: the prerequisites per system (Debian, RHEL, Fedora, SUSE, Alpine, Arch, the BSDs, macOS, Solaris), the xymon user, configure, make, make install, and the web server. 

On macOS it is packaged: "brew install xymon-monitoring/xymon/xymon-server-preview". 

brew install xymon-monitoring/xymon/xymon-server-preview
brew services start xymon-server-preview

We need to release. I propose to promote the preview2: merge the seven as they stand in preview2, the code the lanes passed, and cut 4.3.31. That is a bypass on seven changes the merge table says need a review, said so on each, with the lane results as the evidence.

If you see a better way, say so: a deadline, people running the preview and reporting on the pull requests, one of the seven held back, or anything else. What I want to avoid is another quarter waiting for a review that does not come.

Bruno