nagios-plugins/SUPPORT

SUPPORT

Using the mailing lists and tracker databases at SourceForge are the
best ways to obtain direct support for the Nagios Plugins. There may
also be commercial support options available to you -- check
http://www.nagios.org/ to track the current status of commercial
support offerings.

There are two mailing lists associated with Nagios Plugin development:
'help' (mailto:nagiosplug-help@lists.sourceforge.net), and 'devel'
(mailto:nagiosplug-devel@lists.sourceforge.net). Unless you are fairly
certain you have found a bug or that you are requesting a new feature,
please direct support requests to 'help'.

Because these lists are handled entirely by volunteers, and because
these same volunteers are often plugin developers who can also use
their time to fix bug and provide feature requests, it is generally in
you interest to do a modest amount of legwork before posting to either
of these lists.

Plugins that are in the contrib directories are provided as-is. We will 
try to help, but sometimes the plugins have dependencies that the nagios-plugin
developers do not have access to. You may be able to try the authors
directly.

In brief, always provide the version of the software that you are
using, and when requesting features or reporting bugs, first check to
see that the issue has not already been addressed in the CVS tree.

GETTING HELP

Requests to 'help' require posting the version number of the
plugin. The best place to include the version information is in the
subject. A good post would have a subject like:

  Can I use SSL with check_imap (nagios-plugins 1.3.0-beta2) 1.12

If you do not include the version of the plugin, you risk having your
post silently ignored.

Be advised that the core plugins (and in fact many of the contributed
plugins) will provide a description of their use when invoked with the
'--help' option. Please read the help carefully and in it's entirety
before asking for support.

REPORTING BUGS AND SUBMITTING PATCHES

Bug reports, investigations of possible bugs, feature requests, and
patch submissions should be submitted to the development list at
mailto:nagiosplug-devel@lists.sourceforge.net. Please raise a tracker first 
in Sourceforge, otherwise your email is likely to be missed over time.

You should identify the version, preferably in the subject line. 
However, to best use developer resources, it is suggested that you 
reference your report to one of the following sources:

  1) The most recent release, including beta's

  2) The twice-daily snapshots (there's a link provided on
     http://nagiosplug.sourceforge.net)

  3) The current CVS tree from sourceforge

(This does not mean you should run any of these sources in a
production environment - the latter two you clearly should
not. However, if you find a bug, you should determine whether it is
still present in one of these sources, preferably either (2) or (3)
which are most recent.)

From experience, I know that most bugs can be fixed with only a few
more moments work than it takes to determine if the bug is still
present in the CVS tree. If you can save a developer the expense of
that time, you ensure that bugs are fixed more rapidly, and thus you
ensure your problem resolution is reflected in a stable release more
quickly.