[Nagiosplug-devel] devolper guidelines
Ton Voon
ton.voon at altinity.com
Mon May 15 06:33:38 CEST 2006
On 14 May 2006, at 14:39, Christoph Maser wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> there is a point in the developer-guidelines wich i think is a bit
> problematic.
>
> It says:
> "The -? option, or any other unparsable set of options, should
> print out a short usage
> statement. Character width should be 80 and less and no more that
> 23 lines should be
> printed (it should display cleanly on a dumb terminal in a server
> room)."
>
> The problem i see with this is that if you missconfigure the plugin
> inside nagios you
> might get something like non-ok exitcode with no ouput at all (lead
> to the famous "No
> output returned from plugin". Since the output can be multiline and
> the 1st line can be empty.
>
> An example where this happens is check_nrp called with wrong flags.
> It reutrns a decent
> error-message on STDERR but usage with an empty 1st line on STDOUT.
> I've seen this leading
> to long sessions of debugging.
>
> I would propose to rephrase that part to sth like the following:
>
> "The -? option should print out a short usage statement on STDOUT.
> Character width should
> be 80 and less and no more that 23 lines should be printed (it
> should display cleanly on a
> dumb terminal in a server room).
> Any unparsable or unusable set of options should return exitcode 3
> (unknown) and _one
> line_ on STDOUT indicating the plugin was called with and
> unparsable or unusable set of
> options, and the usage statement on STDERR."
I think it is fair that this is open to review again.
Better error messages that get propagated back to Nagios is a good
aim. Your suggestion makes sense as a -? (intentional) is quite
different from an unintentional bad option. My only change would be
that the 1st line on STDOUT be a "bad option specified" message, with
the rest of STDOUT being the (optional) usage statement. I don't see
a need to separate STDOUT and STDERR output.
Ton
http://www.altinity.com
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Skype: tonvoon
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