[Nagiosplug-help] Contrib plugin

[Andreas Ericsson]

martinus.nel at scarceskills.com wrote:
> Andreas,
> 
> Although I mostly support your answer -RTFM-, gcc is not a simple thing. 

For simple tasks it is a simple thing. A minute of reading the man-page 
would have told you that

gcc <inputfile.c> -o <outputfile>

would in some cases produce a valid binary. The plugin may however 
require extra linking and some additional includes and/or source-code 
modification for your system. It's completely impossible to tell you 
which of these you need to do without investing a rather large amount of 
time and having full insight on the server on which the plugin is going 
to run.

> For some of us, to learn gcc is beyond our scope. 
> 

That is why it is also beyond anyones scope to explain such a wide 
question in an email. The man-pages are there for a reason. Use them, 
and you'll be surprised to see how easy it is to get information for 
simple tasks from them quickly. If you have 'less' as your pager, type a 
slash (/) to search in the man-page.

> If you have the time, could you please give the command line options to be
> used, or supply a make file ?
> 

Supplying a makefile for an unknown system is also one of those things 
beyond anyones scope, but you could try
gcc check_uptime.c -o check_uptime
(provided it's a C source-file ofcourse. For all I know, it might be a 
perl or bash-script).

> ./configure;make;make_install is very simple and easy for us end users :-)
> 

It is indeed. That is why seasoned programmers take the time to create 
proper autoconf files for software they're willing to support. The 
plugin maintainers haven't released a CVS snapshot in eleven months, so 
it's rather safe to assume they've all but abandoned the plugin project, 
and that new plugins won't get incorporated in the near future.

-- 
Andreas Ericsson                   andreas.ericsson at op5.se
OP5 AB                             www.op5.se
Lead Developer