Syslog-ng end of August news, and about scaling back Java support
Most of August, I was on vacation, but now I’m back and I try catching up on the events of the past weeks, just like my colleagues do. Currently, we are fixing issues and reviewing contributions, but we also discussed scaling back our efforts on Java support.
While most of the team was away on vacation, the number of syslog-ng contributions suddenly grew. We support both autotools and cmake, and while differences are narrowing, there are still some minor problems to fix. There are pull requests related to cmake, the syslog-ng disk buffer and more. Check https://github.com/syslog-ng/syslog-ng/pulls?q=is%3Apr+ for a full list of pull requests we are working on.
We also received some new issues. One of them was related to a memory leak when syslog-ng is reloaded. While we fixed several problems, Java was not among them. In fact, we rather disabled packaging Java destination support.
To explain this decision: Java support was introduced back when several destinations had no native C drivers and were only implemented in Java. However, Elasticsearch works fine using a wrapper around the http() destination. Kafka now also has a native C driver. And as for HDFS: well, it is dead, and its code will be removed from syslog-ng soon. A few months ago, I also wrote about disabling Java support in my packages. Now the same is happening with Debian / Ubuntu / RHEL packages available from https://www.syslog-ng.com/community/b/blog/posts/syslog-ng-java-destination-disabled At the same time, we also decided not to work on a Java-related memory leak problem, unless we are notified that someone is actually using the Java destination with a self-developed driver. We were aware of such projects 3-4 years ago, but not anymore.
But are there any benefits of not packaging Java, you might ask? Well, in the Debian / Ubuntu world, many users install the syslog-ng package, which is an umbrella package installing all syslog-ng sub-modules and their dependencies. But even without an umbrella package, I have seen similar solutions from RPM users. Removing the unused Java package from the mix reduces both RAM and HDD usage, which benefits everyone.
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Originally published at https://www.syslog-ng.com/community/b/blog/posts/syslog-ng-end-of-august-news-and-about-scaling-back-java-support