MIR for collectd requires some guidance

[Mathias Gug]

Hi,

Excerpts from Clint Byrum's message of Thu Jul 29 17:17:49 -0400 2010:
 
> In the process of looking at requesting that collectd be included in main, it has become clear that the package is somewhat massive in scope. The methodology is to write tiny C plugins around big C libraries that can then be used to pull data or push data.
> 
> At issue is the fact that collectd has a number of non-main dependencies, and I'm concerned that we may be over-burdening ourselves by adding so much to main. As it stands right now, the dependencies of collectd that are not in main are:
> 
> - libdbi0 has already been requested for MIR due to rrdtool's dependence on it
> - libesmtp is used in the SMTP check plugin and is of a high quality, though does need to sync w/ Debian since recent seucurity updates were made.
> - libganglia1 - Should also be evaluated for MIR status, but not the rest of ganglia. The build-deps for ganglia are all in main except libconfuse-dev
>   - libconfuse-dev is a small library for config file handling and has a clean record for security thus far
> - liboping - tiny C/C++ library for wrapping ping functionality, no open security issues
> - yajl - a fast library for doing json parsing.
> 
> The biggest concern is libganglia. Ganglia is another data collection/monitoring solution, a rather massive one at that. libganglia is used by collectd to run ganglia plugins, allowing collectd to use ganglia plugins unmodified, which is crucial in many environments for migrating away from ganglia. Its also important because Eucalyptus currently publishes ganglia plugins.
> 
> So there are a few ways we can approach this:
> 
> * Just include all of that stuff in main, thus increasing our burden of security maintenance and package support

Could ganglia be MIRed in a similar way to Xen? Even though the xen
source package is in main, only libxen3{,-dev} binary packages are
actually in main. All the other bits are universe.

Similarly ganglia could be promoted to main with libganglia1{,-dev}
being the only binary packages ending up in main.

-- 
Mathias Gug
Ubuntu Developer  http://www.ubuntu.com