[Pkg-nagios-devel] Bug#990457: monitoring-plugins-contrib: Too many things in the same package leads to recommends being ignored most of the time

[Gabriel Filion]

Package: monitoring-plugins-contrib
Severity: normal

Hello,

The monitoring-plugins-contrib package contains many useful things, so I tend
to always install it on hosts. However, many checks that are contained within
it are not really useful most of the time. This means that if I just install
this package as-is, I'll end up with lots of useless dependencies on every
host, so I've started installing it with --no-install-recommends.

This has the benefit of letting me manage what dependencies come with it, but
it has the downfall that I need to manually install the required ones.

I would like to suggest breaking up this package into smaller binary packages
that are focused on one application/service per package. This way one could
install only the checks that are required with their individual requirements.

The package named monitoring-plugins-contrib could be kept in place just to
make it depend on all of the other smaller packages. This way the current
behavior would be kept around for ppl used to installing this package and
getting it all in one go.

-- System Information:
Debian Release: 11.0
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (500, 'unstable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Foreign Architectures: i386

Kernel: Linux 5.10.0-6-amd64 (SMP w/4 CPU threads)
Kernel taint flags: TAINT_CPU_OUT_OF_SPEC, TAINT_WARN
Locale: LANG=en_CA.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_CA.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE not set
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)
LSM: AppArmor: enabled

monitoring-plugins-contrib depends on no packages.

Versions of packages monitoring-plugins-contrib recommends:
ii  bind9-host                                         1:9.16.15-1
ii  binutils                                           2.35.2-2
ii  curl                                               7.74.0-1.3
pn  debsecan                                           <none>
ii  file                                               1:5.39-3
pn  freeipmi-tools                                     <none>
ii  libc6                                              2.31-12
ii  libdata-validate-domain-perl                       0.10-1.1
pn  libdata-validate-ip-perl                           <none>
ii  libdate-manip-perl                                 6.85-1
pn  libdbd-mysql-perl                                  <none>
ii  libio-socket-ssl-perl                              2.069-1
ii  libipc-run-perl                                    20200505.0-1
ii  liblocale-gettext-perl                             1.07-4+b1
pn  liblwp-useragent-determined-perl                   <none>
pn  libmail-imapclient-perl                            <none>
pn  libmemcached11                                     <none>
pn  libmonitoring-plugin-perl | libnagios-plugin-perl  <none>
pn  libnet-cups-perl                                   <none>
ii  libnet-dns-perl                                    1.29-1
ii  libnet-dns-sec-perl                                1.18-1+b1
ii  libnet-smtp-ssl-perl                               1.04-1
pn  libnet-smtp-tls-perl                               <none>
pn  libnet-smtpauth-perl                               <none>
pn  libnet-snmp-perl                                   <none>
ii  libnet-ssleay-perl                                 1.88-3+b1
ii  libreadonly-perl                                   2.050-3
pn  libredis-perl                                      <none>
ii  libsocket-perl                                     2.031-1
ii  libtimedate-perl                                   2.3300-2
pn  libwebinject-perl                                  <none>
ii  libxml-simple-perl                                 2.25-1
pn  lz4                                                <none>
ii  lzop                                               1.04-2
pn  nagios-plugins-basic                               <none>
ii  openssl                                            1.1.1k-1
ii  perl                                               5.32.1-4
ii  perl-base [libsocket-perl]                         5.32.1-4
ii  python3                                            3.9.2-3
pn  python3-pymongo                                    <none>
ii  ruby                                               1:2.7+2
ii  snmp                                               5.9+dfsg-3+b1
ii  whois                                              5.5.10

Versions of packages monitoring-plugins-contrib suggests:
pn  backuppc                   <none>
pn  cciss-vol-status           <none>
pn  expect                     <none>
ii  libsys-virt-perl           7.0.0-1
pn  moreutils                  <none>
pn  mpt-status                 <none>
pn  nagios-plugin-check-multi  <none>
pn  percona-toolkit            <none>
pn  perl-doc                   <none>
pn  python3-boto               <none>
pn  smstools                   <none>