[Nagiosplug-devel] RFC: Plugins config file (final proposal)

[Tobias Klausmann]

Hi! 

On Mon, 05 Feb 2007, Ton Voon wrote:
> > On Wed, 2007-01-31 at 12:50 +0000, Ton Voon wrote:
> >> QUOTING IN CONFIG FILE
> >
> > i think we should be very, very clear on this.  my opinion is that
> > we shouldn't do any quote parsing/interpretation, and pass what
> > is given verbatim to the plugin. 
> 
> It seems to me that the big dispute at the moment is the quoting of  
> the config file. I assume this means everyone is happy about  
> everything else in the RFC :)

Speaks for its quality :)

> I agree that there needs to be clarity on the syntax, but I don't  
> necessarily agree that we need to go down the road of creating a 
> (nother) implementation of ini file parsing. It could just be an  
> education issue.
> 
> Can I suggest that we start with using an existing library first - I  
> would choose http://ndevilla.free.fr/iniparser/html/index.html from  
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/INI_file for the C implementation. Once  
> we have it integrated, we'd understand better the positives and  
> negatives. As Sean points out, an iniparser_getdict() to return a  
> list of keywords for a section would be a worthwhile enhancement to  
> that library - this could be something that we contribute back  
> upstream. If we find further down in the development cycle that this  
> library is not sufficient, hopefully there would be a precise list of  
> what features it lacks.
> 
> I'm happy to add to the RFC that the config file syntax is not  
> finalised, to set that expectation before we make it publicly available.
> 
> I personally think the option handling part is the more difficult bit  
> to code, so I don't want to get too distracted by the config syntax bit.

I'm fine with this as long as we keep an eye out for
incompatibilities. Having to tell Python users they can't use
their language's stdlib ini-parsing module because it's
incompatible won't come across terribly good, I guess :)

Regards,
Tobias

PS: Reminds me of having hostnames identical in DNS and Novell's
NDS: due to incompatibilities, you're stuck with case-folded
[a-z0-9] and - plus various more complicated rules regarding
leading and trailing - and numbers. Not nice.

-- 
Never touch a burning system.