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
...[email truncated]...
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