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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