[hobbit] Comments wanted - OK to drop BB support in Hobbit ?

[PAUL WILLIAMSON]

>>> henrik at hswn.dk 04/21/05 7:20 AM >>>
> This brings up a slighty bigger issue.
> 
> Since Hobbit grew out of the Big Brother environment, it is 
> still possible to configure Hobbit for use with BB - it is in 
> essence a "bbgen 4.0".
> 
> I would like to drop that, since it does make things more 
> difficult for future developments, and I honestly haven't 
> done any testing against BB for some months now. Right 
> now the development focus for Hobbit is the 
> "behind-the-scenes" server functions, but should the focus 
> at some point go towards new features in the user-interface 
> part of Hobbit, it would be difficult to stay backwards 
> compatible with Big Brother in the sense that you can run 
>  e.g. the Hobbit version of bbgen on top of Big Brother.
> 
> So what do you say - can I drop the BB support and focus 
> entirely on a pure Hobbit environment?
> 
> It's still something I decide, but I would appreciate your 
> input. If I do decide to drop BB support in Hobbit, I will 
> wrap it up with a bbgen 3.6 release to close that down nicely.

Henrik,

As someone who uses BB and has never gotten bbgen to work 
right, but does have Hobbit working, I'd say jettison the project 
from any BB connections.  

There are a few immediate benefits I can see growing out of this.

1.  A true database backend.  Trying to tie the legacy BB stuff 
into it would be more difficult than just doing your own 
efforts.

2. Better notification/escalation support.  One of my 
biggest issues with BB is this piece.  There is largely no way 
to send a new notification (I use traps, no paging) when 
the status goes from yellow to red, or red back to yellow.

3.  More colors would be easier.  yellow/red for problems is 
almost not enough.  

4.  A real event list.  Having the last 25 events in a web page 
is ok, but being able to have a sortable list of events based 
on severity (plus some other issues), would be much nicer.

There's my opinion.  Like you said, it's ultimately up to you.
It doesn't seem like the BB guys had any problems with 
going commercial, you shouldn't have any issues going it 
on your own.  

Paul