[Nagiosplug-devel] Plugin guideline suggestion

[Voon, Ton]

Maybe I haven't asked the right question, so let me try again: what are you
trying to solve with these version identifiers?

Just because it is easy doesn't mean that it should be done. I note that
your and Andrea's suggestion of #ident has the disclaimer "isn't supported
by all compilers" which immediately makes me reticent.

The --version is (currently) the official way and if there are any plugins
that do not have this, then I am more than happy to accept patches for this.
But I don't want to introduce "another way" for the sake of it. Unless you
have a very good reason.

-----Original Message-----
From: Jason Martin [mailto:jhmartin at toger.us] 
Sent: 18 January 2005 16:20
To: nagiosplug-devel at lists.sourceforge.net
Subject: Re: [Nagiosplug-devel] Plugin guideline suggestion


On Tue, Jan 18, 2005 at 08:23:52AM -0000, Voon, Ton wrote:
> While I think this suggestion has merit, we usually use check_xxx 
> --version to grab the version number (which also displays the release 
> version too). Is there a specific reason you want the what 
> identifiers?
I've found that --version isn't uniformly handled in the plugins. Some look
for -V, --version, -v, and so on.  Adding support for --version to all the
plugins would entail making some large enhancements to some of them as they
aren't using getopts at all (such as many of the contrib ones). Adding the
what/ident idenfiers is very easy to do in all languages since one just has
to either enter a comment or define a string variable. Updating all the
existing plugins to do this would be very easy.

--version also requires that the plugin work. If there are any libraries /
modules missing then the plugin can't execute to return the data. what/ident
does not require the plugin be in working order.

-Jason Martin
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