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. *
- 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