[hobbit] Time to merge bbwin into hobbit

[Buchan Milne]

On Saturday 08 March 2008 12:13:40 Henrik Stoerner wrote:
> On Sat, Mar 08, 2008 at 10:20:20AM +0100, Ulric Eriksson wrote:
> > As developer of another Hobbit client, I would prefer the opposite:
> > replace the big switch in hobbitd_client.c with something that allows
> > independent development of clients. As it is, developing a new client
> > requires patching Hobbit or sticking with the old Big Brother protocol.
>
> Agreed, that would be nice. It wasn't a concern back when I wrote the
> original code, but it has become more pressing nowadays.
>
> There is a way around it, though - you can build a separate
> hobbitd_myclient module using bits and pieces from the Hobbit code,
> merged with your own module. It isn't the most elegant of solutions -
> you'll need to run both the standard hobbitd_client and your own in
> parallel - but it is a way around it.
>
> There are also some licensing issues with incorporating Hobbit code into
> your own module - you'll have to release your code under GPL. Don't know
> if that's an issue for You.

A plugin interface could solve this, only the plugin would need to be under 
the GPL.

Hacking up parts of Hobbit, resulting in patches that overlap, and which may 
never be merged is heading everyone who needs rrd support not provided by 
Hobbit towards a maintenance nightmare.

Exposing some of the internal hobbit functions in a shared library would have 
other advantages too, especially if they were (possibly by other parties) 
exposed to other languages (perl, python) via bindings. I am thinking 
specifically of configuration parsing, threshold management etc.

Regards,
Buchan