The past days, we have worked on making rsyslog daily builds and tarballs a reality. We hope this will enable users to rapidly deploy the latest features as well as make it easier to help with testing the current development system. Daily builds are what the scheduled v8-devel builds were under the previous release paradigm. Consequently, the archives are named v8-devel.
Right now, builds are only supported for Ubuntu. Users of other platforms are advised to use the daily tarballs to build from source. Depending on feedback on and success of the daily builds, we will make them available for more platforms.
A daily build is based on the latest git master version. So it really is at the [b]leading edge of technology. So why create them?
A top reason is that we often fix a bug for someone, and that someone then is unable to build from source. In the end result, we have a bugfix, but there is no external confirmation that it really fixed the bug when we merge it into the next release. We hope that now those users can simply pick the daily build and check if that solves their problem.
Also, in general we hope that some users will use the daily tarballs to get not only the latest and greatest but contribute to the project by doing some testing.
Finally, and quite important, with daily builds we will see build problems as early as possible. In the past, we often saw problems only after source release (or very close to it), which was obviously problematic. Now, this should no longer happen. For obvious reasons, the final release build is now more or less a copy of a daily build.
As a technical side-note, daily builds are identified by the git master branch head hash that was used to build them. As a forth version component, they have the first 12 digits of that hash (an example is “8.8.0.35e7f12a2c04″). This enables us to track error reports to the right version. The packages have a different version name, based on the build date. The reason is that the hash does not increment and so newer versions (with lower hash values) are considered as “old” by Launchpad. We avoid this by using an always incrementing package version. Also note that the package changelog just contains a “daily build” entry — anything else makes limited sense.
We hope you enjoy this new feature! Feedback is appreciated.