[Nagiosplug-devel] [RFC] Plugins config file

[sean finney]

apologies in advance for having to reply to each mail individually...


On Wed, 2006-10-18 at 11:08 +1000, Gavin Carr wrote:
> You mean William's comment here? :

yeah, that's the one.

> It clearly _does_ involve another point of configuration, as you've still
> got a new file containing configuration data; but as least it's the same
> kind of configation i.e. just a new place to put arguments - is that what
> you mean here?

yes.  i guess i didn't consider that as "configuration" but it's more or
less the same thing without the syntactic sugar, so i'll have to admit
that point i suppose :)


> - the config file here contains just a single item, where I was suggesting
>   an ini-style config allowing multiple sections. This way I guess you end
>   up with a lot of little config files (arbitrarily named, I guess) 
>   containing argument snippets to various plugins; my way you end up with 
>   multiple sections in a single well-known config file. You _can_ use
>   multiple files in my proposal if it's motivated by other factors, like
>   John's comment that he'd like to separate them out by permissions, but
>   it's not required. I guess if we go this way we might want to a separate
>   directory (e.g. /etc/nagios/plugins) to prevent these configs cluttering
>   up the main nagios directory

i think the later discussions between you and ton put this in a better
light as far as i'm concerned.  that is, mapping directly to the
--long-opts and thus passing the options to getopt as necessary.

> - this way uses plugin arguments directly, where I was suggesting using 
>   arbitrary name-value pairs that then get mapped back to plugin arguments.
>   Using plugin arguments directly is simpler, but it means that each config
>   is tightly coupled to a particular plugin's argument set - if another 
>   plugin also wants to connect to that same database but happens to use 
>   -P for password, you need to duplicate your config details, with all the
>   associated maintenance issues. So I think the extra level of indirection 
>   is worth it, but it's clearly arguable both ways.

i think this is kind of a red herring argument though.  i don't think
that we have that many plugins with that many different ways of passing
arguments... and if we did i'd say we ought to fix the plugins so they
do have the same cmdline interface.


	sean
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