[Nagiosplug-devel] Hooray - 1.4 is out! What next?

[Andreas Ericsson]

Ton Voon wrote:
> Well, we've finally got to 1.4. Thanks to everyone who has helped get 
> this release out and helped make this software better.
> 

Splendid news. Nice work, fellas.

> What's next? Firstly, I'm not going to branch the code just yet. During 
> the 1.3 and 1.4 period, it was a pain to try and write to two branches, 
> so I suggest we leave one branch going for a month which will take us to 
> 1.4.1. This will be mainly bug fixes, but I think it is okay to commit 
> patches that are a bit more complex, and even add small extra 
> functionality.
> 
> However, major work should not commence until the branching. I'll leave 
> it to you to decide what "major" work is :)
> 
> If you have contributions to add, make sure it is in SourceForge, 
> otherwise it may slip off the minds of the developers!
> 
> Another lesson I've learnt is that we should do more releases more 
> often. Having a huge release just causes too many problems with alphas 
> and betas. I provisionally say we do a 1.5 release around September, but 
> that really depends if we have any major functionality added. I'll take 
> a "want list" from all of you after 1.4.1 is released.
> 
> If anyone disagrees, let me know - I'm always ready to be persuaded.
> 

I disagree. You should release even more often than that. Check if you 
have ten or more new (small) features or bugfixes at the end of each 
month, and if you do, make a micro-release (1.4.1 -> 1.4.2).

For 1.5;
* aim to get rid of output parsing plugins completely. Implement system 
calls to get disk/memory/swap/load status instead (the ISC dhcp suite of 
programs have excellent ways of determining system type and version).
* rewrite commonly used perl/shell/python/whatever plugins in C. (this 
will in time allow Nagios to load plugins as shared modules, which can 
only be a good thing).
* minimize the perl module dependencies.

Just my $0.02

-- 
Andreas Ericsson                   andreas.ericsson at op5.se
OP5 AB                             www.op5.se
Lead Developer