[Xymon] RES: Is the xymon Dead? Future

[Axel Beckert]

Hi,

On Fri, Mar 08, 2019 at 01:31:35PM +0000, John Horne wrote:
> On Fri, 2019-03-08 at 12:09 +0000, SebA wrote:
> > Many years ago, I pushed for Xymon to be moved from VCS to SVN to promote
> > community  contributions.

I think you meant CVS instead of VCS. VCS (Version Control System) is
the general term for CVS, SVN, Git, Mercurial, etc.

> > Git, specifically GitHub, has replaced SVN as the best thing to
> > promote community contributions, and I think it would be
> > beneficial if the official Xymon code repos are migrated to
> > GitHub.

Definitely, but it's also not the only thing which is needed for
getting contributions from external contributors. It's also a social
thing.

Reviewing and accepting contributions — or maybe even giving
trustworthy contributors commit access is also necessary for a FLOSS
project. But as far as I can tell, this happens in the Xymon project,
although not on a daily base.

> but github would allow the community to report issues,

SF does allow that, too, it's just not enabled for the Xymon project
on SF. Example of an SF project where it is enabled:
https://sourceforge.net/p/nfsen/bugs/

> provide updates/patches via pull requests,

Exists on SF, too, example: https://sourceforge.net/p/nfsen/patches/

> and download either released versions via the tags

Possible, too, example:
https://sourceforge.net/p/xymon/code/HEAD/tarball?path=/branches/4.3.27

> if necessary or the latest code via the 'develop' (or
> whatever) branch.

https://sourceforge.net/p/xymon/code/HEAD/tarball?path=/branches/4.x-master
https://sourceforge.net/p/xymon/code/HEAD/tarball?path=/trunk

Don't get me wrong: I think SF degraded from once the best place to
host FLOSS to a website with tons of outdated trash and the most
horrible UI I ever saw from a code hosting site. Not to mention that
it is far too overladen with ads and popup.

My personal preference in VCS hosters is also GitHub as — from my
point of view — they currently provide the best user experience. OTOH
there might be some qualms about Github being not completely open
source and being owned by Microsoft.

And with regards to being dead or not: Development greatly sped up
when J.C. Cleaver took over release management, but it indeed seems to
have stalled a little bit again. Then again, IIRC J.C. mostly took
over release management so that Henrik can focus on long-time
development. And if there is not much to fix in the current stable
releases, not having a stable release every few months is not
necessarily "dead", but might also be "stable, no relevant open
issues".

(And yes, I'm still hoping and waiting for IPv6 support, too,
especially in xymonnet-based checks. Reporting to IPv6-only servers is
no issue though, if you anyways use stunnel to encrypt the
client-reporting traffic.)

		Kind regards, Axel
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