The nagios community wants to keep its open soul

[Gius, Mark]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Andreas Ericsson [mailto:ae at op5.se]
> Sent: Friday, February 26, 2010 7:38 AM
> To: Nagios Developers List
> Subject: Re: [Nagios-devel] The nagios community wants to keep its open
> soul
> 
> On Fri, Feb 26, 2010 at 4:00 PM, anthony paradis
> <funkyman78 at hotmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > I expect a professional response from you
> >
> 
> Is it just me who can picture Ethan giggling away at the keyboard while
> he was writing that email? Personally, I thought it was hilarious :
> 
> But alright, I'll come in with a professional response here.
> 
> Most software projects expect the users who want features in the core
> code to develop those features themselves and submit patches that
> can be discussed and polished to perfection. The Nagios community
> works a bit differently. Users are crying out for new features,
> although
> they're often not very specific about what those features are supposed
> to be, and even more rarely users post patches to make that particular
> feature happen.
> 
> It's really quite simple. If you have a feature you want implemented,
> you can
> a) submit a patch to make it happen.
> b) whine.


A few months ago, I went through the process for A.  In early November, I posted a query about an issue my company was having with service escalations and long-standing "warning" states.  Gmane seems to be down right now, so I can't post a link to it, but original email sent to nagios-users 2009/11/05 at around 6:49PM PST, subject "Escalate after X warnings or critical."  The feature I wanted didn't exist, so I downloaded the source and patched it in myself.

On 2009/11/17, I posted a patch to nagios-devel, and updated it twice.  Once at the request of Hendrik Baecker, and once to add my new configuration directives to the HTML docs. I have heard nothing about the possible inclusion or exclusion of this patch to the mainline tree since then, although I did specifically ask if there was a step I had missed that was preventing my patch from being considered.

I understand that my patch was unsolicited, and may not be in the direction that Nagios wishes to go, but the complete lack of response was rather irksome to me (and is somewhat related the "Ethan doesn't listen" complaints that pop up from time to time).  If the Nagios team had rejected my patch and given a reason (not in the right direction, no testing, breaks case foo, etc.), it would give me a direction to go in regards to eventually integrating my patch.  As it stands now, I have to maintain my own private fork indefinitely because I simply don't know whether my patch is going to be accepted upstream.

Just my experience here.

Mark Gius

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