Feedback on evaluation of collectd-6.0.0.rc3 build

Feedback on evaluation of collectd-6.0.0.rc3 build

[Adolf Belka]

Hi All,

collectd has a release candidate 3 for their 6.0.0 version. This version has significant changes to its data structure etc so I thought I would test out the build and install it and see what was different compared to the existing 5.12.0 version.

First things the current version we are using was released in September 2020. There have been ongoing commits in branch 2.12 up to Feb 2024 but no further release mentioned. There is also a 5.13 branch but the last commit in that was in Mar 2023.

Branch 6.0 has commits from 2020 or earlier up to September 1 2025. However version 6.0.0.rc3 was released in Feb 2024.

I ran the build but it failed due to dependency errors. Reviewing the logs it turns out that there are a lot of plugins that have no collectd6 way of working yet (which was the dependency error) but can be run in v5 compatibility mode.

So I did that but the build still failed with two plugins that were specified as not being able to be built due to dependency errors. These two, network and rrdtool both just say collectd6 support missing - dependency error. These are not able to be run in v5 dependency mode.

This basically stops any evaluation of 6.0.0.rc3 in IPFire as the only way to build would be to disable those two plugins.

I might still test this out so I( can see the data model structure changes that come with the cpu, df, disk, interface and memory plugins.

It seems that the collectd6 developers went straight to a rc0 version without an alpha or beta step but with a large number of plugins not yet compatible with the new way of working.

To my mind that does not make it a release candidate.

Checking through their github structure I found that rrdtool has an issue raised by the developers as a tracking issue for migrating rrdtool to collectd 6. This was raised in 2020. A user has submitted an initial implementation of an updated rrdtool plugin in April 2025 but nothing further has been recorded since then.

For the network plugin I have not been able to find any reference anywhere.

In the collectd project section on github I have found 21 plugins listed in the ToDo list with a "help wanted" tag. Interestingly enough neither the rrdtool or network plugin are in that list.

So overall my conclusion is that version 6.0.0 is some way away. They seem to have the same problem of not enough resource to work on collectd6 as we struggle with on IPFire3.x but they also struggle with doing anything with their released version of 5.x

I think we will just stay on version 5.12.0, although I will trawl through the 5.0 branch commits and see if there is anything we should have in our version or if we can just stay with the vanilla release.

I will probably send an email or raise an issue with the collectd team to report my findings with rc3 on IPFire and see what response I get.

Regards,

Adolf.