Short notes from Nagios devcon #1

[Andreas Ericsson]

This mail contains plenty of "if you can, please help us make
this happen faster", so if you want to contribute to Nagios in
a very real way, read it all through and see what you can do
to help us help you :-)

Ethan, Ton and my humble self got a chance to sit down and put our
heads together right after the Nordic Meet on Nagios that ended
yesterday (Thursday June 4, for those who are browsing archives).
This was a very brief and informal meeting, but we managed to
iron out some few details that we'd like to share with the rest
of the Nagios developer community.

Most of what we agreed on can be read on wiki.nagios.org. I think
Ton put the bulk of the info in the Developer Guidelines or some
such.

Release roadmap
---------------
We'll be cutting a 3.1.1 release fairly soon (almost certainly
next week or the week after that). Plenty of good bug- and
performance-fixes have been applied recently, so we feel it's
time the community can benefit from those changes without having
to resort to downloading the CVS snapshot. If you know of any patches
that have not yet been applied, feel free to send a reminder to the
list so that me, Ton or Ethan can pick it up. To make our life
easier, resend the patch with a summary of what the patch does and
why doing that is a good idea. Thanks.


Testing
-------
Core Nagios now has some pretty decent testing facilities (thanks
to Ton Voon). If you're experiencing something that feels like a
bug in Nagios but don't know how to fix it yourself, you can now
create a test for the bug and send in that. Fixing a problem that
has a proper test attached to it is an absolute delight :-)
Ton is in charge of testing in Nagios. Pester him to write up
something about it on the wiki if you're having a hard time
groking how it works.

cvs -> git
----------
Since CVS is exceedingly cumbersome to work with for a team larger
than one, we'll be switching to git. This will happen right after
Nagios 3.2.0 is released, which we hope will happen sometime in
August. The "official" Nagios git repository will almost most likely
be hosted on git.nagios.org OR code.nagios.org. Announcements will
be made with full URL's to gitweb, repositories and whatnot. We
discussed helping addon maintainers host their code on code.nagios.org
as well, although no decisions were made along those lines. We'll
likely iron out the details as we get requests for this. Note that
nothing will be hosted until Nagios development is already set up,
but we can ofcourse discuss things a bit earlier :-)
Ethan wants to maintain either the CVS or SVN repository on
sourceforge. I don't know how that can be implemented, as I haven't
set up such a thing before (at op5 we just switched and let CVS go
hang). If anyone has done something like that before and would like
to help, feel free to send all the info you can provide (or links to
HOWTO's or scripts or whatever) either to this list or to me directly.
Thanks.


Coding guidelines
-----------------
We decided that our commits should be accompanied with a fairly
detailed summary of What&Why. That is, "What does this change do,
and why is that a good idea". I'd like to take this opportunity
to ask patch contributors to provide this information when sending
patches to nagios-devel. Many patches have the "what", but omit
the "why", which make them exceedingly hard to analyze. Generally,
it results in a volley of me or someone else asking "how come you
want this patch applied?", and if no satisfactory answer can be
given we just drop it as we don't like code churn any more than
other programmers ;-)

Indentation
-----------
We'll be using a script or program to indent the Nagios sources.
What the final sources will look like is not decided yet, but
we're aiming for something that GNU indent can produce. If anyone
knows of some other freely available and fairly common C-code
beautifier, please let us know (for preference one which can indent
with tabs and do continuation with spaces, which GNU indent can't).
This is necessary in order to maintain a unified style throughout
the sources with a minimum of effort.

New GUI
-------
We'll likely use Ninja as the new default GUI for Nagios. Currently,
Ninja only supports fetching data from the Merlin database. If
anyone's interested in adding a filebased driver for Ninja, taking
this step would be a great deal easier. Contact me, this list or
Per Asberg (per.asberg at op5.com) if you're a competent PHP programmer
and would like to help out. Sources and clone-url are available at
http://git.op5.org/git/nagios/ninja.git


That's about it, I think. Not exactly earthshaking, but good for
the developer community to know about anyways.

-- 
Andreas Ericsson                   andreas.ericsson at op5.se
OP5 AB                             www.op5.se
Tel: +46 8-230225                  Fax: +46 8-230231

Considering the successes of the wars on alcohol, poverty, drugs and
terror, I think we should give some serious thought to declaring war
on peace.

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