[Pkg-nagios-devel] Bug#640070: nagios-plugins: some ideas on improving the package documentation

[Jan Wagner]

Hi Christoph,

On Freitag 02 September 2011, you wrote:
> > This is intentionally, as we had serveral complaints and bugreport by
> > users
> > which wanted to get rid of these dependencies but using the package.
> > These dependencies are recommands and are installed automatically, if you
> > didn't have disabled installing recommands, which is the default behavior.
> 
> Well... I'm a bit uncertain whether I find this good or not,..
> Clearly you have the advantage that you don't have to pull in deps you
> don't need anyway... OTOH this somehow breaks the idea of the dependency
> system.

maybe you should have a look into the Debian Policy, especially into "Chapter 
7 - Declaring relationships between packages"[1] and 
http://www.debian.org/doc/FAQ/ch-pkg_basics.en.html#s-depends:

"Package A recommends Package B, if the package maintainer judges that most 
users would not want A without also having the functionality provided by B."

This is exactly our usecase ... as there maybe users which want to have some 
packages installed, which are needed by nagios-plugins-standard. By default 
recommanded packages are installed automatically[2], so nothing "breaks"! If 
you disable installing recommanded packages automatically, you have to care 
about yourself.

> Personally I'd prefer to see than a sub-package per check, and the
> -standard package either just another meta.package or going.

Sorry, cluttering the package into so much packages is wasting disk space 
(e.g. on mirrors, installed systems) and making package maintainance more 
complex without real benefit.

> > Sorry, you are a confusing me a bit as I don't understand what you want to
> > tell me. /usr/share/doc/nagios-plugins-standard/README.Debian.plugins
> > exists
> > on all system which have the package nagios-plugins-standard installed.
> 
> Yes, but if you have just the -basic installed,.. that file is still
> referred to in the README.Debian file of the -basic (!) package.

Which isn't a problem, if you want to use some plugins of the nagios-plugins-
standard package, you likely want to install this package and in this case you 
can have a look into this file, if and what package is needed to get the 
plugin working (just in case you disabled auto installation of recommended 
package, if not these packages are installed anyways).

> >> It should perhaps be noted, that the -basic plugins have no furhter deps,
> >> and all are already guaranteed via package dependencies, AFAIU.
> > 
> > I think "This package provides a basic set of plugins with minimal
> > external
> > dependencies." is sufficiant and this is part of the actual description of
> > nagios-plugins-basic.
> 
> I rather meant this for the README.Debian file anyway,... to show that -
> in contrast to the -standard package - users don't have to manually install
> deps.

And again, if you didn't touch the package management[1], you don't have to 
care about this as the packages are allready installed. If you have touched 
packages managment, we imply that you know what you are doing and keeping care 
of the Recommends yourself and exactly for this case we have 
"/usr/share/doc/nagios-plugins-standard/README.Debian.plugins" as additional 
documentation for you in place.

> > I don't thing this makes really sense, as something like 'apt-cache show
> > nagios-plugins-standard | grep "^[Depends|Recommends]"' gives you this
> > information.
> 
> Well this gives you just the list of _all_ deps/recommends... you don't
> know from this which you actually need for say check_bgpstate. None? all?
> just libnet-snmp-perl?

Did you ever have a look into 
"/usr/share/doc/nagios-plugins-standard/README.Debian.plugins"?

Ciao, Jan.
[1] http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-relationships.html#s-binarydeps
[2] http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/i386/release-notes/ch-whats-
new.en.html#pkgmgmt
-- 
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