[Nagiosplug-devel] Integrating Nagios::Plugin into the distribution

[Thomas Guyot-Sionnest]

On 28/04/07 08:25 AM, Gavin Carr wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 27, 2007 at 01:05:51PM +0100, Ton Voon wrote:
> 
>> Installing into system directories affects other people's code. I'd  
>> rather not be responsible :)
> 
> You're not - it was whoever pressed that install key. ;-)
> 
> Okay, so you're seeing the whole separate-install thing as a feature,
> isolating you from screwing up (or being screwed up) someone else's
> libraries?
> 
> I guess I'm seeing that risk as relatively small, especially given the
> modest set of dependencies we have. I'm much more suspicious of the 
> duplication problem. If you end up having multiple versions of the same
> modules in different locations, you're going to be prone to all kinds
> of weird problems if you're not careful. Simple example: imagine an 
> N::P from CPAN and a different N::P installed in /usr/local/nagios, and 
> home-grown or third-party perl plugins behaving in very confusing 
> ways dependent on which way the lib path is set up ...

Have you read my arguments on this? I believe that changes in the CPAN
libs should not affect Nagios-plugins and vice-versa. The two problems I
see are:

1. Bugs/incompatibilities that could slip in newer version of
Nagios-plugins. Since we'll be allowing newer version of N::P to be
installed we could get bug reports that only affect certain combinations
of packages.

2. Upgrading N::P on systems that have a too old version could possibly
break existing plugins that are not part of Nagios-plugins. Some of
these plugins may come from sources like Nagiosexchange and their
developers might not be offering a fixed version (and not all systems
admin write Perl)

I don't think there's good chances of having "weird problems" if N::P is
in a separate dir. Nagios-plugins Perl plugins will all have the "use
lib" instruction to get the packaged N::P, while all other should use
the system one (Unless the developer intended to use the local one).  In
either case it shouldn't be broken though.

Thomas