Mediation needed for munin-node and munin-main

[Lupe Christoph]

Hi, folks!

Since Sergey Matveychuk and I can't agree on how munin-node should
behave, we agreed ;-) to defer to the ports mailing list. Please tell me
how you would handle Munin. Sorry for the long post, but I would rather
dump all you might want to know at once than answer lots of questions. I
guess there still will be some.

The issue is that the deinstall of both munin-node and munin-main leaves
files behind. In the case of munin-main they are created by a cron job,
so a test install may see them or not.

Let me give you some background about Munin.

Munin is a distributed system that gathers performance data and
generates webpages with graphs with the help of RRDtool. There are two
components, the gatherer which only needs to run on one system (the
munin-main port), and the collector that extracts information from one
system using a very simple plugin architecture (the munin-node port).

The Munin node uses a daemon process that has a few config files, and a
plugin directory. All files in that directory that fulfill some criteria
are used as plugins. Since there is a lot of plugins, not all of them
are useable or relevant for a given system. In order to be able to make
all of them available for the user and let them choose, Munin uses
symlinks that point to the plugins. Some plugins have names like xxx_.
Those parse the name they are called with (e.g. xxx_yyy) and use the
last part as an argument. This could be the name of an interface.

So the symlinks are configuration. The port follows the example of the
Debian package in automatically installing plugins if there was no
pre-existing set. It also installs a VERSION file that allows it to
install recently added plugins on an upgrade.

I cannot remove the symlinks. I could skip installing the default set,
making munin-node a bit more difficult to manage for the user. But I
still have to have this VERSION file.

The same problem exists for munin-main. I could skip installing the
cronjob, making the port less friendly, creating more pitfalls for the
user.

Mathieu Arnold suggested I ask this mailing list. I did
http://docs.freebsd.org/cgi/mid.cgi?20040303100543.GW2562
but received no help.

Now I ask again because Sergey and I can't agree. Mathieu agreed that
adding a message to pkg-plist would do. This message has evolved over
time, and I missed adding it to munin-main until recently.

But it seems this will not placate Sergey :-P So I have to ask again:
what is the accepted way of dealing with files that are needed for an
upgrade or that will be precious to the user?

Sorry for wasting time and bandwidth.
Lupe Christoph
-- 
| lupe at lupe-christoph.de       |           http://www.lupe-christoph.de/ |
| "... putting a mail server on the Internet without filtering is like   |
| covering yourself with barbecue sauce and breaking into the Charity    |
| Home for Badgers with Rabies.                            Michael Lucas |