I intended to focus on new development for rsyslog v5 exclusively, but as it turns out, I announce a new v4-devel build today: version 4.7.0.
So what is happening? Do I no longer believe in v5? Not at all! But we have thankfully received some grant to make rsyslog available on Solaris, and I wanted to have this killer-feature for v4 as well. It turned out to be impractical and somewhat confusing (for end users) to do that in v4-stable. After all, some code areas need to be touched and the Solaris-unique code is obviously brand new and far from being stable.
So I concluded that the best approach is to revive v4-devel, but in a controlled way. I will not put any new request into that version. Most of new feature requests will go in v5 only. However, there may be some exceptions. Already, with 4.7.0, I have included some things that I consider either very useful or easy to integrate. Note that much of this easiness is related to the fact that in autumn 2009 the original plan was to release 4.7.0, and thus some new features were already integrated. I have not removed them, and now v4 users can gain the benefits. Note, however, that I did not maintain these changes. So there may be bugs inside them that I already fixed in v5. Quite honestly, I did not do any extra testing to rule that out. However, the testbench runs without any problems on 4.7.0.
Note that the new v4-devel branch will bring some select enhancements in the future. One thing I have on my mind is a small, but potentially troublesome, enhancement to the background log writer that can potentially boost performance pretty much.
However, the majority of new work will go into v5, exclusively. But you will not see that much happen there in the next couple of days/weeks as my next milestone is strongly focused on getting full stable Solaris support into both v4 and v5 (note that v5-devel, the master branch, also already supports Solaris).