On Sun, Sep 19, 2010 at 3:10 PM, Holger Levsen <hol...@layer-acht.org> wrote: > > Hmmm. In the past (etch iirc) we had some plugins from munin exchange... we > also had like 50 patches, which mostly you cleaned up :) Doing it the > traditional way would be to include it with a patch and add it to the > munin-plugins-extra binary package. Nowadays we only ship the plugins > included in the upstream source and nothing extra. > > What do you propose for this adsl modem script?
Well, we've already seen the results of accepting contribution plugins, and adding them to the debian munin-plugins-extra package. We get a huge mess of patches creating plugins which in effect do not have any owner or maintenance upstream. This puts a burden on us as packagers, which in addition to packaging and solving bugs in munin core and munin core plugins, we effectively become somewhat fork of munin which maintains extra plugins beyond the core "official" plugins. This causes people to loose focus from upstream and from munin-exchange, which are the proper places to add plugins, AFAICS. > > I think the wish to have those adsl modem plugins packaged is a legitimite > one, reopening. Same for other plugins from munin exchange... I agree that the wish is legitimate. However, I think the right way for a plugin to get packaged, is to be good enough, and popular enough, as to get included in the official upstream core, or upstream contrib plugins, and the way to do that is through munin exchange, which offer the author a great way to publish a plugin , along with screenshots, descriptions, version control, comments on the plugin, download statistics - all things that we cannot provide by placing a plugin as a patch. When munin-exchange was recently redesigned, there was talk about a sort of "apt-get" like tool to search/download plugins directly from munin-exchange. As far as I know this was not written yet, but the infrastructure for it is already there. The rewritten munin-exchange has an official API [1], so the tool will eventually get written, and people using munin, which have this specific ADSL modem and want to monitor it will be able to query munin exchange for it and download the plugin. But for now they can do it manually. :) [1] http://exchange.munin-monitoring.org/docs/api/ Basically, what I'm saying here, is : why should we include one specific plugin, and not any of the other 500+ plugins already in munin-exchange? It does make sense to include patches to plugins that are debian specific, but even for those, I would still try to include them upstream first, and only add them as a patch only if upstream refuses to do so. That's just my 2cents, Tom Feiner -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
