Xymon development inquiry
Instruction / call for feedback
This summary was prepared from mailing list discussions and user input to give a clear overview of the current Xymon situation.
Feedback from users, maintainers, and operators is strongly requested to confirm this view and to indicate their willingness to help by briefly listing their relevant skills, availability, and areas of interest (e.g. maintenance, releases, packaging, testing, or specific technical domains).Resume
- Xymon development is largely inactive upstream.
- Version 4.3 is the only production-ready release.
- Version 4.4 is unfinished and experimental.
- Most maintenance work is done downstream, causing duplicated effort.
Main problem
- There is no active upstream maintainer group and no modern collaboration workflow.
- This is the root cause of fragmented patches, stalled releases, and unfinished work (notably IPv6 in 4.4).
Minimal requirements / immediate next steps
- One public Git repository accepted as the upstream reference.
- One or two interim maintainers with merge and release responsibility.
- One maintained production branch: 4.3.
- A basic issue list to track bugs and patches.
- A first consolidated 4.3.x maintenance release.
Who can help
- Distribution maintainers (Debian, FreeBSD).
- The original author (Henrik) for CVS migration support.
- Production users for testing and validation.
- Community members willing to help maintain releases.
Bruno
Hi,
speaking for myself, I must admit that I haven't worked on Xymon for several years. Just lurking on the mailing list occasionally.
J.C.Cleaver was maintaining the 4.3.30 version and I was working on the 4.4 branch, but both efforts have stalled - mine certainly has.
A Git repo would undoubtedly make it easier for people to contribute than the current Sourceforge CVS repository, so if the is an interest in maintaining or even developing Xymon further, then that would be a very good first step.
About the state of the various branches, 4.3 is certainly the production version - this should be priority #1 when moving to Git. The 4.4 branch is - as Roland mentions - very unfinished and alpha-like. It was an attempt on my part to move all of the networking code into a library with support for both IPv4 and IPv6 - quite a bit of it was working, but it was not completed or even stress-tested. It is certainly not bug-free.
I cannot offer to restart Xymon development by myself, but I will be happy to assist anyone with getting the code moved from Sourceforge to a Git repo - if you need any special access to Sourceforge.
Regards,
Henrik
Roland Rosenfeld skrev den 13-01-2026 08:47: