A 1.3 Nag release ?

[Stanley Hopcroft]

Dear Folks,

I am keen to back port the 2.0 embedded Perl changes (to re-init the 
Perl interpreter after 'n' checks, so that the size of the Nagios binary 
does not grow without limit).

Is there any interest in a 1.3 release with (at a minimum) embedded Perl 
changes ie from 2.0

1 re-init the Perl interpreter periodically

2 return Perl plugin results via perl_call_argv() instead of a /tmp file

3 p1.pl changes to return compilation faults with plugin output - no 
more 'No output!' - and compile time options for logging at various 
verbosity levels of Perl activity.

Both 2 and 3 have been used by me in a production hack of 1.2 for more 
than 6 months without problems (other than the increase in memory use 
that should be dealt with by patch 1).

Since I anticipate trouble (TM) with the thread support on *BSD systems 
of Nag 2.0, there may be some point in maintaining the 1.x series.

I don't feel strongly about this since the 2.0 release looks extremely 
good.  Unfortunately *BSD systems may struggle with it.

<off topic>

BTW, for what it's worth, I have noticed a tendency to blame 
the embedded Perl support for _any_ and _every_ trouble with Perl 
plugins reported on Nag users.

I suspect that this blame is uniformed since it is much easier to write 
a bad Perl plugin, or one that the embedded Perl support fails to 
compile, than to identify actual problems in the embedded Perl code. 
This is why for example that mod_perl provides an alternative to the 
Registry module for CGIs that are so bad they cannot take advantage of 
the normal mod_perl/Registry process of compile once and run many times.

The Perl component (ie p1.pl) of the embedded Perl support in Nagios 
appear to be very similar to the mod_perl 1.x Apache::Registry.pm 
module, a module that is not often heard described as 'buggy'.

Now I can well appreciate that I don't understand much, if anything 
about embedding Perl, but the fact remains that

1 it works so well for me that I wouldn't consider a plain Nagios,

2 any criticsm about the embedded Perl support should probably take the 
form of patches to this list, or silence on Nag users.

3 until an established Perl developer (ie someone with at least a 
popular actively developed XS module [DougM where are you ?]) offers to 
maintain this valuable facility, I will do my best to support it.

</off topic>


Yours sincerely.

-- 
Stanley Hopcroft

Network specialist, IT Infrastructure
IP Australia
Ph: (02) 6283 3189  Fax: (02) 6281 1353
PO Box 200 Woden  ACT 2606
http://www.ipaustralia.gov.au


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