[rtg] RTG Digest, Vol 38, Issue 2

[Steve Scaffidi]

On 8/9/07, bill fumerola <billf at mu.org> wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 02, 2007 at 09:08:12PM -0400, Steve Scaffidi wrote:
> > I've built debian source and binary packages of RTG with Bill's yrtg patch.
> >
> > I'd be happy to share them... heck, with permission from both Bill Fumerola
> > and Robert Beverly I would be happy to submit them for inclusion in Debian's
> > repositories and be the maintainer.
>
> if you've gotten my patches to apply to a recent version of rtg OR figured
> out the magical date of the CVS repo that my rtg patches apply cleanly, i'm
> very interested in that data. (either a new patch or the magic date)

Magic date is:  2004/11/03

However, while the yrtg patch will apply there, I had to modify
configure and Makefiles to bring the package in line with the current
state of GNU auto-tools-stuff. I've saved those changes as patches...

> in terms of permission: all the files i created from scratch are BSD
> licensed and all the ones i modified are BSDL+GPL. you don't need my
> permission. that being said, since my patches significantly deviate from
> rtg's internal structures and designs you might want to make it clear
> (different package name, giant warning) that it's not stock rtg.

I kept the rtg name for the package, but the version is 0.8.1+yahoo.
I'll see what I'd need to do to change it while still keeping the
original sources pristine. I'm actually quite new at packaging, but
I'm a stickler for making sure I do things right.

As far as naming goes, since all I've done is apply your patch and
clean up the build configs, perhaps yrtg would be good?

> not for attribution reasons (though i don't mind being mentioned, who
> does?) but because of the differences there may be new bugs, different
> bugs, the same bugs that got moved to different code, fixed bugs, and
> undocumented/incomplete features relative to the rtg that this list
> supports/represents. in other words, i don't want others to be blamed
> if someone finds a bug in my code.

Well, the package-description, when queried with dpkg currently
includes the following:

"DO NOT BUG BILL WITH ANYTHING OTHER THAN PROFUSE THANKS AND
APPRECIATION. All questions, comments, and descriptions of bugs and
what-not should be sent to me. I can't promise anything, but I'll
try."

I can amend that before a public release. :)

> i'm interested to hear about any outside (read: not my own) comparisons
> between the two versions (performance, stability, feature set) as well.

My employer is a telco running it's own network over 16 states. We
have tens of thousands of customers and the goal is to be able to
provide on-demand utilization reports to them all. We'll hopefully be
using rtg, in some incarnation, as the polling engine in our network
by the end of the year - meaning I haven't used it yet except for
limited tests. When I built the package we were shooting for a June
deployment but then schedules and priorities got re-arranged. Anyhow,
if anyone can provide a decent test of the package, we can.


When I figure out how to do the package rename while preserving the
original source name I'll send out a link to a web server where the
source and binary packages can be downloaded.