[Nagiosplug-devel] Re: OF nagios plugins

[Paul L. Allen]

Andreas Ericsson writes: 

> Paul L. Allen wrote:

>> In which case -W should be added to the list of reserved options in the
>> Plugin Developer Guidelines.
> 
> Why? I would have thought it fairly obvious that plugins should adhere to 
> ANSI, POSIX, SUS and UNIX *prior* to whatever the guidelines says.

Not everyone knows all of those things in as much detail as you do.  I'd
expect most people here were surprised to learn of POSIX's -W. 

Even if the number of people who already knew of -W is a lot higher than I
thought, one day somebody who doesn't know of -W's POSIX usage will write
a plugin that follows everything in the guidelines but happens to use -W
because it's not mentioned as reserved.  The plugin will be submitted,
then you'll point out that -W is reserved for POSIX, then a patch may
eventually be submitted, then the developers will say the patch has been
committed, then somebody will ask what's wrong with -W and if it is
reserved by POSIX why don't the guidelines mention it, then you'll say
it's obvious, then...  It may be redundant information to the few people
who have read every line of source code in Linux but it cuts down on
potential list traffic if the guidelines mention it. 

In the end it's up to the core developers to decide whether or not -W
and any others like it, should be mentioned. 

-- 
Paul Allen
Softflare Support