On Wed, Jun 03, 2009 at 09:27:58AM -0500, Marc Powell wrote: > All the objects are referenced as Definitions so 'not defined' isn't art > so much as English.
Hi Marc, Thanks for all the pointers. When you say "All the objects are referenced as Definitions" - capitalizing "Definitions" makes it clear it's a term of art. I take it then that the inability of the .cfg file to simply function like those of many other configuration files in the *nix universe and pass on flags is a constraint imposed by OOP architectural philosophy? It looks a bit like needless multiplication of entities to a naive view like mine. But I'm sure I'll get used to it. I'm sure at some point the documentation will all come into focus too. At first acquaintance, it's sketchy, scattered and disorganized. I've been doing various sorts of coding and sysadmin for 20 years, and usually new docs are easy for me to grasp. Navigating from the "Nagios 3.x Documentation Table of Contents" - which is where Nagios itself sends me for "Documentation" - it's not at all clear where to go for a definition of "Definition". Nor would it be helpful to just read the whole thing - trying to absorb "Passive Host State Translation" and other arcane, specialized topics leads to cognitive overload and side-tracking, not an answer to the pragmatic question of why Nagios config files don't follow the norms of the *nix space. Nothing against that! Nagios has strong capabilities, and I'm committed to use it. But the "Configuration Overview" page in the Doc would be much improved if it really gave an overview. Instead, it's just a stub of an outline that quickly shunts the reader off to other documents, which in turn are just stubs of outlines that quickly shunt the reader off to yet other places. The job of an overview, IMHO, should be to give an overview, all in one place. It should make sense by itself. Sending the reader to other docs, which send the reader to other docs, which send the reader to other docs - just to get a sense of what the overview is ... well, that's terrible documentation writing, no matter how much time it took to set it up that way. The Overview should function like an Introduction in a book. The Introduction can't demand that the reader read the whole book first to make sense of the Introduction. Maybe at some point I should contribute to the documentation, once I have a good working overview myself. Regards, Whit ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ OpenSolaris 2009.06 is a cutting edge operating system for enterprises looking to deploy the next generation of Solaris that includes the latest innovations from Sun and the OpenSource community. Download a copy and enjoy capabilities such as Networking, Storage and Virtualization. Go to: http://p.sf.net/sfu/opensolaris-get _______________________________________________ Nagios-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/nagios-users ::: Please include Nagios version, plugin version (-v) and OS when reporting any issue. ::: Messages without supporting info will risk being sent to /dev/null
