Re: it scares me a bit...

[Vlada Macek]

Thanks for replies.

Yes, I was responding to the "http grep" feature proposed here
recently. To add this feature, large piece of C code will have to be
added or linked to monit. Being good programmers, I'm sure you are
aware, that adding any text processing feature with sufficient
capabilities is always expensive and rarely done right. More code is
always bug-prone (especially string manipulation). In case external
reg-exp library is used, you'll end up relying on external library
software. IMHO it will not worth the result, majority will not use it.

Arbitrary string greping of arbitrary docs is completely different
task from what monit already does -- checksumming arbitrary data; and
I disagree with you that given monit already have checksumming, this
will be just a feature refining.

I appreciated monit for being self-containing and compact. AFAIK all
features introduced so far were bearable to occur in software on place
of init. I run monit prominently, from /etc/inittab, and I consider it
such. I do not wish my init-like to understand regular expressions. It
is high level job that should be done by high level programs possibly
written in high level languages where resources are not tight and
completion may take forever.

Immature idea: What about to add some action command line argument,
e.g. `monit alert <why> <where> <what>' to trigger the monit alerting
machinery from the external script? This way the monit's core
functionality will stay untuched by the external triggering programs
(bugs in them, complexity, their delays...). The alerting machinery
will stay on one place configured from the single file.

I know I have no vote here (had only contributed fews tens of
codelines and some proposals in the past), but I really disagree with
such feature. Please keep init-like software on low (system) level.
Keep arbitrary string processing routines away from this core daemon
as long as you can. Otherwise, you have to expect one thing from now,
you'll start to get more and more similar proposals for bloating
features, given you already accepted regexps. One of them will be
proposals based on regexps...

If you're still to implement this feature, please make it
./configurable. With default off, at best. :-) No external library
requirements. Anyway, once monit will be capable of such things, I'm
afraid its reputation will get some scars in minds of admins like me.
Those who love neat, simple and smart tools.

***

And for the OSS project future topic, I present the example of GNU C
Compiler. I expect no new features from it, it's already perfect AND
it's far from being the dead project (both from my point of view). It
does what I need and it hardly could do it better.

***

Are me and Michael here with such attitude alone?

-- 


\//\/\
(Sometimes credited as 1494 F8DD 6379 4CD7 E7E3 1FC9 D750 4243 1F05 9424.)

signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature