Fedora 44 was announced last week: syslog-ng 4.11 is part of it. While checking the Fedora Copr build service for Fedora 44, I realized that CentOS 7 and Amazon Linux 2023 packages are also there. I have a few questions about those for you!

Fedora 44

The availability of the Fedora 44 release was announced last week. Vesion 4.11 of syslog-ng, the current latest release, is part of it. As usual, I did a quick test: everything works as expected.

RHEL 6

The removal of RHEL 6 packages from Copr was announced many years ago. Then, the countdown was silently canceled. I have just checked: RHEL 6 packages are no longer available, so I deleted all my related repositories. Also, I deleted a couple of temporary test repos along the way.

CentOS 7

When talking to product manager friends around the world, I realized that syslog-ng is not an “enterprise” application. “Enterprise” developers are still actively maintaining packages for RHEL 6, when even RHEL 7 has reached end of life a long time ago. Of course, this is just a satirical definition of “enterprise”, at least in my view…

Support for RHEL 7 / CentOS 7 was dropped in syslog-ng a month before the distro became end-of-life. Copr announced the deletion of CentOS 7 packages, but after a while, the countdown suddenly disappeared. Packages built 10+ years ago are still here, and CentOS 7 is still a valid build target.

Question: is there anyone still using my syslog-ng packages on RHEL 7 / CentOS 7? Otherwise, I would be happy to delete anything related from my Copr repositories. I could delete many repositories, save storage, and I would not have to deselect them as a build target during package builds.

Amazon Linux 2023

Another question mark in my mind is Amazon Linux 2023 support. If we can believe the download statistics provided by Copr, then this is one of the most popular syslog-ng repos on Copr. However, over the years, I only received a single feedback about it, which was on Twitter years ago: “Thanks, I use it.” That is all. While there were regular requests to create these packages, nobody asked for features, updates, whatever. The repo is still stuck at syslog-ng version 4.8.

Question: should I update syslog-ng to a more recent version, as time permits?

What is next?

Share your thoughts with us in this syslog-ng GitHub discussion: https://github.com/syslog-ng/syslog-ng/discussions/5691 or reach out to me on Twitter / Mastodon / LinkedIn.

Originally published at https://www.syslog-ng.com/community/b/blog/posts/fedora-44-centos-7-and-amazon-linux-syslog-ng-questions

• syslog-ng
• fedora
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