Nagios 2.0!

[Tom DE BLENDE (GCC)]

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!

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.

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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