1 files changed, 25 insertions, 16 deletions

diff --git a/doc/developer-guidelines.sgml b/doc/developer-guidelines.sgml
index e7754f4e..eb5b0391 100644
--- a/doc/developer-guidelines.sgml
+++ b/doc/developer-guidelines.sgml
@@ -11,7 +11,7 @@
       </author>
     </authorgroup>
 
-    <pubdate>2009</pubdate>
+    <pubdate>2013</pubdate>
     <title>Nagios plug-in development guidelines</title>
         
     <revhistory>
@@ -22,7 +22,7 @@
     </revhistory>
 
         <copyright>
-                <year>2000 - 2009</year>
+                <year>2000 - 2013</year>
                 <holder>Nagios Plugins Development Team</holder>
         </copyright>
 
@@ -34,7 +34,7 @@
     the plug-in developers and encourage the standarization of the
     different kind of plug-ins: C, shell, perl, python, etc.</para>
 
-        <para>Nagios Plug-in Development Guidelines Copyright (C) 2000-2009
+        <para>Nagios Plug-in Development Guidelines Copyright (C) 2000-2013
         (Nagios Plugins Team)</para>
 
         <para>Permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim
@@ -83,10 +83,18 @@
                 STDOUT and not print to STDERR.</para>
 
                 <section><title>Print only one line of text</title>
-                <para>Nagios will only grab the first line of text from STDOUT
-                when it notifies contacts about potential problems. If you print
-                multiple lines, you're out of luck (though this will be a feature of 
-                Nagios 3). Remember, keep your output short and to the point.</para>
+                <para>Starting with version 3, Nagios will process plugins' multiline
+                output, which should be formatted as:</para>
+                <literallayout>
+                SERVICE STATUS: First line of output | First part of performance data
+                Any number of subsequent lines of output, but note that buffers
+                may have a limited size | Second part of performance data, which
+                may have continuation lines, too
+                </literallayout>
+                <para>Note, however, that the default configs still do not include
+                the output's continuation lines into the notifications sent when
+                Nagios notifies contacts about potential problems.
+                Thus, keep your output short and to the point.</para>
 
                 <para>Output should be in the format:</para>
                 <literallayout>
@@ -269,10 +277,6 @@
                                                 <entry>@10:20</entry>
                                                 <entry>&ge; 10 and &le; 20, (inside the range of {10 .. 20})</entry>
                                         </row>
-                                        <row>
-                                                <entry>10</entry>
-                                                <entry>&lt; 0 or &gt; 10, (outside the range of {0 .. 10})</entry>
-                                        </row>
                                 </tbody>
                         </tgroup>
                 </table>
@@ -319,10 +323,14 @@
                 </section>
 
                 <section><title>Performance data</title>
-                <para>Performance data is defined by Nagios as "everything after the | of the plugin output" -
-                please refer to Nagios documentation for information on capturing this data to logfiles.
-                However, it is the responsibility of the plugin writer to ensure the 
-                performance data is in a "Nagios plugins" format.
+                <para>Nagios 3 and newer will concatenate the parts following a "|" in a) the first
+                line output by the plugin, and b) in the second to last line, into a string it
+                passes to whatever performance data processing it has configured. (Note that it
+                currently does not insert additional whitespace between both, so the plugin needs
+                to provide some to prevent the last pair of a) and the first of b) getting run
+                together.) Please refer to the Nagios documentation for information on how to
+                configure such processing. However, it is the responsibility of the plugin writer
+                to ensure the performance data is in a "Nagios plugins" format.
                 This is the expected format:</para>
 
                 <literallayout>
@@ -351,7 +359,8 @@
                 <listitem><para>min and max are not required if UOM=%</para>
                         </listitem>
                 <listitem><para>value, min and max in class [-0-9.]. Must all be the
-                        same UOM</para>
+                        same UOM. value may be a literal "U" instead, this would indicate that the
+                        actual value couldn't be determined</para>
                         </listitem>
                 <listitem><para>warn and crit are in the range format (see 
                         <xref linkend="thresholdformat">). Must be the same UOM</para>