On Fri, Feb 26, 2010 at 4:00 PM, anthony paradis <funk...@hotmail.com> wrote:

Is it just me who can picture Ethan giggling away at the keyboard while he was writing that email? Personally, I thought it was hilarious :D

But alright, I'll come in with a professional response here.

Most software projects expect the users who want features in the core code to develop those features themselves and submit patches that can be discussed and polished to perfection. The Nagios community works a bit differently. Users are crying out for new features, although they're often not very specific about what those features are supposed to be, and even more rarely users post patches to make that particular feature happen.

It's really quite simple. If you have a feature you want implemented, you can a) submit a patch to make it happen. b) whine.

If you're a positive person (like me), you'll try to make it happen first. If that fails, you can ask for help with a message like "hey, I tried this but can't make it work. Here's what I want to achieve and why I think that's a really stellar idea. Is anyone else capable of making this fly?"

With that attitude, it's really a breeze to get exactly what you want from practically anybody. Demanding nameless features that you're not sure what they would do is a surefire way of getting no response what so ever.

So let's have a look at what requests there are on Nagios. These are from ideas.nagios.org, which I assume is a decent collection of ideas that people share. I've only bothered with the top five or so, since it already shows a very very clear pattern without going further than that.

* New gui. Lots of people want this. Well, that's something that can easily be implemented outside the nagios core, and there's currently at least two teams working on making that true. One is at op5 and the other is the icinga team.

* Clustering/redundancy/loadbalancing/failover stuff. A lot of competent programmers (Nagios core devs included) all agree that such a feature needn't reside inside the Nagios core itself, but would be much better off written as a module. DNX, Merlin and other efforts are under way and are nearing production quality or are already on it.

* New statusmap. Well, we at op5 have developed several already. They're free for grabs, since we've made sure to publish all our git repositories. You want to fly around in a 3d landscape in a java app? It's there for the taking. You want something that works with google maps and lets you draw whatever you want on a map? That too is already there, contributed back to NagVis, which we decided to use for that particular thing. You want something where hostgroups and their parent relations are drawn? lo and behold, we have that too. Download it and install it. If you can't figure out how to make it work, that's a different issue that we can work with after you've tried and failed.

* Web frontend for configuration Nacoma (the op5 written tool) has been opensource and totally free for the past year or so. Go grab it. It works wonderfully for our 400+ customers and we actively develop it.

* SLA reporting tool Again, it's up for grabs from the op5 git repositories. Just download and install it and you'll have corporate quality reports. Again, we do actively develop it.

Besides the above ones, many of the suggestions on ideas.nagios.org are already implemented or could easily be implemented by someone who really cares about the feature requested. But people are lazy and seem to be scared of ending up maintaining a software project, though they have no hesitation asking someone else to do what they really don't want to or can do.

The shameful part are all the requests for things that already exists. I can understand non-developers asking coders for features, but I have a hard time respecting people who can't even be bothered to google for something they claim they want, and then whine about it when they don't get it.

-- Andreas Ericsson andr...@op5.se OP5 AB www.op5.se Tel: +46 8-230225 Fax: +46 8-230231

Considering the successes of the wars on alcohol, poverty, drugs and terror, I think we should give some serious thought to declaring war on peace.

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