Some might have noticed that I am not as active as usual on the rsyslog project. As this seems to turn out to keep at least for the upcoming couple of weeks, I’d like to give a short explanation of what is going on. Starting around the begin of June I got involved into a political topic in my local village. It’s related to civil rights, and it really is a local thingy, so there is little point in explaining the complex story. What is important is that the originally small thing grew larger and larger and we now have to win a kind of election – which means rallies and the like. To make matters a little worse (in regard to my time…) I am one of the movement’s speakers and also serve as subject matter expert to our group (I am following this theme for over 20 years now). To cut a long story short, that issue has increasingly eating up my spare time and we are currently at a point where little is left.
Usually, a large part of my spare time goes into rsyslog and related projects. Thankfully, Adiscon funds rsyslog development, and so I can work on it during my office hours. However, during these office hours I am obliged to work on paid support cases and also a limited number of things not directly related to rsyslog. Unfortunately, August (and early September) is main holiday season in our region. As such, I also have limited co-workers available that I could share rsyslog work with. And to make matters “worse”, I need to train new folks to get started with rsyslog work – one of them does a summer internship, so I need to work with him now. While new folks is always a good thing to have on a project (and I really appreciate it), this means further reduction of my rsyslog time.
The bottom line is that due to all these things together, I am not really able to react to issues as quickly as I would like to. The political topic is expected to come to a conclusion -one way or the other- by the end of September. Due to personal reasons, I will not be able to do work at all in early October (long-planned out of office period), but I hope to be fully available again by mid October. And the good news is that we will have a somewhat larger team by this time because Jan, who does the internship, will continue to work part time on the project. Even better: Pascal will be with Adiscon for the next months on a full-time basis and will be able to work considerable hours on rsyslog.
So while we have a temporary glitch in availability, I am confident we’ll recover from that in autumn and we have very exciting work upcoming (for example, the TLS work Pascal has just announced). I have also a couple of very interesting suggestions which are currently discussed with support contract customers.
All in all, I beg for your patience. And I am really thankful to all of our great community members which do excellent work on the rsyslog mailing list, github and other places. Not to forget the great contributions we increasingly get. Looking forward to many more years of productive syslogging!