[Pkg-nagios-devel] Bug#933217: RM: check-mk -- RoQA, RC-Buggy, unmaintained, no reverse dependency

[Matt Taggart]

Hi,

Thanks for opening this bug, this should have been discussed a while ago.

check-mk in debian was originally packaged and uploaded for Debian when
it was a pretty basic nagios add-on. Since then upstream has both
continued to add features and automation layers above that basic
functionality (OMD, BI, etc) and also at the same time made a commercial
business out of selling support and added non-FOSS components.

It is now very difficult to support the check-mk core functionality as
it's packaged in Debian. I began packaging the 1.4.0 stable release and
realized that the levels of integration of the core functionality and
the higher layers were going to make it nearly impossible to untangle.

For check-mk to continue in Debian we'd need to either:

1) fork the "Checkmk Raw Edition (CRE)" and work to remove the
dependencies and non-FOSS integration, maintaining the fork over time
and merging changes made to the core agents.

2) repackage the FOSS components, adopting all of upstream's levels of
automation and integration as a monolithic package and no longer just be
an add-on for other monitoring system.

My own use of check-mk involved using a puppet module to automatically
configure checks for new systems as they were added, by automatically
editing config files. This does not work well with the "full stack"
model where the administrator is expected to do things via a UI. So
option #2 is not interesting to me, and option #1 sounds like a lot of
work. What I need to do next is investigate icinga2's equivalent
functionality and see if that's a good replacement option.

I think it's fine for check-mk to be removed from unstable, if it does
end up in Debian again it will be repackaged and should go through NEW
again anyway.

Thanks,

-- 
Matt Taggart
taggart at debian.org