Nagios 2.0!
Andreas Ericsson
ae at op5.se
Thu Oct 21 13:16:46 CEST 2004
Tom DE BLENDE (GCC) wrote:
> Ethan,
>
> Nagios is great. Hell, it's beyond great. The day you decide to leave
> this project, will be a black day in the history of Nagios in particular
> and Open Source in general. Thanks for all your efforts. I am amongst
> the ones that truely value them!
>
We all are, hence our concern and eagerness to assist.
> To Andreas: GG NO RE TNX KK (I'm sorry for the juvenile vocab, I happen
> to play the occasional game of Warcraft every now and then). Please fork
> Nagios into your own project and start up a mailing list of your own. It
> would do Nagios the world of good.
>
What on earth is that GG NO etc. stuff supposed to mean?
I have no intention of fully forking the Nagios codebase. I have
suggested a number of ways for active contributors to stay up to date
with each others patches. One of the suggestions involved a secondary
CVS repository for contributors to check in their obvious bugfixes only.
Sorry, but you'll have to live with me being around a while longer.
> Keep up the good work Ethan!
> Tom
>
> Ethan Galstad wrote:
>
>> Okay, there have been a number of messages on the list over the past
>> few days, relating to Nagios 2.0 development (or lack thereof), that
>> need to be addressed.
>>
>> First, this project does not rule my life. I imagine the plugin
>> developers feel the same about their involvement, though I can't speak
>> for them. This project is something we work on in our spare time. We
>> don't work at this full time and we don't get paychecks from Nagios,
>> Inc. We all have day jobs and, believe me, we don't rush home after a
>> full day of work and plop ourselves back down at a computer to eagerly
>> apply all the latest patches so we can get a warm fuzzy feeling inside.
>>
>> Development on this project has its ups and downs, its slow periods
>> and its frenetic periods. This is a slower time as far as development
>> is concerned. Please realize that without slowing down occassionally,
>> we'd all go crazy, end up hating this project, and eventually abandon
>> it altogether. Amazingly, this project has managed to survive and
>> thrive over the past 5+ years.
>>
>> As far as patches are concerned, yes there is a bit of a backlog.
>> That's just the way I've had to juggle things lately. Every so often
>> I'll go through and apply some of the backlogged patches. Some, not
>> all. I don't always think all the patches have merit. Some patches I
>> sit on and think about for months before I decide whether or not they
>> should be incorporated. Those that I do commit are often rewritten or
>> mangled before doing so. I rarely, *rarely*, ever apply patches to
>> CVS verbatim. Sometimes I edit for coding style, othertimes its to
>> change to patch so it doesn't break things elsewhere. I always
>> manually review the patches that come in, so I can completely
>> understand what they're doing and what they'll affect. As such, it
>> doesn't matter to me if different developers submit conflicting
>> patches or patches against a slightly older version of the code. I
>> can manage that just fine.
>>
>> As far as giving additional developers CVS write access, I'm not at
>> that point yet. After 2.0 or 3.0 I may very well decide to leave this
>> project for good and hand over the reins to others. At that point,
>> you can all go nuts and do whatever the new maintainers allow. For the
>> time being, however, patches for the core program still need to go
>> through me. If you're not happy with that, you can always:
>>
>> 1. Run 1.x and not 2.0 alpha code in your production environment
>> 2. Keep bugging me until I commit the patch to CVS
>> 3. Maintain a separate repository with your own patches (a mini-fork)
>> 4. Fully fork the code into another project
>>
>> If you choose option #3, you might very well run into the problem
>> where you have a highly customized version of Nagios which is no
>> longer stock. As I mentioned previously, I don't accept all patches
>> and I rewrite/mangle many of them before committing them to CVS. As
>> long as you're able to keep on top of the Nagios CVS commits when they
>> occur, you can manage it, but it'll keep you busy. Some big
>> organizations do something like this, so they can have a customized
>> version of Nagios in house. Of course, they have some extra work to
>> do when Nagios CVS commits are made and when new versions are released.
>>
>> If you want to fork the project, please feel free to do so. Many of
>> you are well qualified to do this, and I am certain that your project
>> will succeed, so long as you can dedicate the time and energy to
>> maintain the project over a number of versions and years. Just don't
>> name the forked project anything similar to "Nagios", as I have a
>> trademark on the name.
>>
>> I've heard mention of the fact that "some people" may be abandoning
>> Nagios because the alpha 2.0 code isn't being patched quickly enough
>> or released soon enough. What is this? Slashdot?? What FUD!
>> Nagios/NetSaint has been around for over 5 years and it gets better
>> and has more users with every version.
>> Am I to believe that people who have used NetSaint and upgraded
>> through Nagios 1.x are going to abandon it for a commercial app
>> because 2.0 isn't coming out soon enough? If that's true, why in the
>> world were they running NetSaint x.xx or Nagios 1.x in the first place
>> then? Those versions didn't have the new features that Nagios 2.0
>> will. And yet, amazingly, they chose to use it. Give me a break. If
>> you desperately need the features that Nagios 2.0 will have (or won't)
>> and a commercial app offers it, lay down the cash and buy it. Geez!
>> Don't use Open Source for purely philosphical reasons when your
>> business would be better off with a commercial app.
>>
>> What about the people run 2.0 alpha code you ask? What about them?
>> Oh dear! If you choose to run *alpha* code, you are asking to get put
>> through the ringer on a few things. Bugs galore, "slow" patches,
>> etc. If you want stable, run 1.x. If you want bleeding edge, try
>> 2.0. But don't complain too loudly if it doesn't work perfectly.
>> Don't complain if all the new patches don't get applied fast enough,
>> or at all. If you're using alpha code in a production environment and
>> your business depends on it, you should tidy up your resume
>> immediately because nothing is guaranteed when it comes to this stuff.
>>
>> Bottom line is: don't run Nagios because of what features it *might*
>> have in the future. Run it because it works for you *now*. Ask
>> yourself, "Why am I running Nagios *right now*"? Present moment. Its
>> not a Zen thing, its just common sense. If it doesn't work well
>> enough for you right now, put your energy towards finding something
>> that does.
>>
>> Andreas, you've stated that you're concerned by the lack of CVS
>> activity with regards to patches. Okay then. In May I spun off NRPE
>> as a separate project from the Nagios CVS repository in order to help
>> free up some of my time and let others take over as maintainers. You
>> and Derrick volunteered to be the primary maintainers, with me as a
>> backup. At that time you had made some mods to NRPE that were
>> supposedly going to be committed to CVS. Five months down the road
>> and there's still nothing in CVS. The project site
>> (http://sourceforge.net/projects/nrpe) is deserted, other than for
>> the barebones home page I put up. What's the status with this? This
>> is as much of a concern to me as backlogged patches for Nagios.
>> Should I import the old NRPE CVS repository into the new and/or
>> recruit other maintainers? Please let me know.
>>
>> Alright, enough for now. I'm tired, irritated, most likely
>> irrational, and have probably managed to tick off more than a few
>> people. I'll post a followup in the next few days with a list of
>> outstanding 2.0 patches that I'm aware of and list off which ones
>> aren't going to make it, which ones are, etc. Ciao.
>>
>> Ethan Galstad,
>> Nagios Developer
>> ---
>> Email: nagios at nagios.org
>> Website: http://www.nagios.org
>>
>>
>>
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>>
>
>
>
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--
Andreas Ericsson andreas.ericsson at op5.se
OP5 AB www.op5.se
Lead Developer
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