[Nagiosplug-devel] Announcement regarding nagiosplug 1.4 release

[Ton Voon]

Hi!

This is just a quick email to say that there will be a push by the 
Nagios Plugins team to get the next release finalised - I will be 
taking on this task. Karl DeBisshop has stood down from Project 
Administrator because he was unable to commit the time required. His 
contributions will be sorely missed as he has been with this project 
from the very beginning, but he intends to keep an eye what is going 
on.

As the rest of the team have also not been able to spend much time on 
the project, we are pleased to announce that we have taken on two new 
developers. Matthew Kent and Harper Mann have agreed to join the team 
and will be taking care of all the outstanding patches and bug reports 
in the Sourceforge tracker system. Expect to hear a lot more from them 
soon.

We are keen on getting the latest version out because there are some 
major features that 1.4 has over the current 1.3.1. These include:
- IPv6 support
- Internationalisation support, for translation of plugin output
- check_disk now using the GNU coreutils library
- More performance data, to our new standard format
- Support for many more OSes, including AIX, Tru64 and MacOSX

We have set out a basic timetable for the release schedule:

Thursday 3/12/2004 - Next alpha release: 1.4a2
Thursday 16/12/2004 - Another alpha release: 1.4a3
End December - Beta release: 1.4b1
End January - Final 1.4

How can you help? As always, please use the latest code available (at 
http://nagiosplug.sourceforge.net/snapshot) and let us know of any bugs 
or if you have patches (but we are not accepting any major enhancements 
for the current release). This is best done through Sourceforge's 
tracker system (at http://sourceforge.net/projects/nagiosplug) because 
otherwise it may get lost in the mailing lists. Also, performance data 
has not been fully implemented on all plugins - patches will be 
gratefully received if they conform to the guidelines 
(http://nagiosplug.sourceforge.net/developer-guidelines.html). Finally, 
we are looking for volunteers to do some of the translations - at the 
moment, we only have partial translations in French and German. Let me 
know if you want to help.

While this is the plan, please remember that this is an open source 
project. As such, everyone involved is making a judgement call on 
spending time on this project instead of time with their friends, 
families or cars. We'll aim to get as much done as possible, but please 
understand if the schedule slips or the quality is compromised.

I look forward to announcing the new releases soon.

Ton