Dave, Many thanks indeed for your detailed reply. I'll see just what the customer is looking for !!
Best regards, Iain. -----Original Message----- From: Dave Shield [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: 13 December 2005 10:36 To: Iain le Duc Cc: [email protected]; Iain le Duc Subject: Re: History and community size On Sun, 2005-12-11 at 01:22 +0000, Iain le Duc wrote: > How long has the Net-SNMP "product" been around? The Net-SNMP project has been operating under that name since 2000, but this was basically just a rename of the UCD-SNMP project, which dates back to 1995. This in turn built on the previous CMU-SNMP software, which was one of the very first SNMP suites ever developed. But it would probably be unfair to say that Net-SNMP is the same S/W as CMU. There are still vestiges of CMU design visible in the Net-SNMP code, but the two have diverged significantly over the last ten years! See http://www.net-snmp.org/about/history.html for a fuller description. > How long has the v3 version of it been around? 1999 The UCD SNMPv3 work was undertaken as part of providing an official reference implementation for SNMPv3. > How stable is the current software? (i.e. how much change > is it undergoing in terms of LOC per annum and as a %?) Ummm.... That's a difficult one to answer! Our aim is to try and release a new version (of the "latest" code) roughly once a quarter - either as a bug-fix release (e.g. the recent 5.2.2), or as a "new feature" version (e.g. the upcoming 5.3). We don't necessarily always meet those targets, but that's the aim. I wouldn't like to guess how much of the code would change over the course of a year - a quick analysis of a couple of the core library files gives the following: snmplib/snmp_api.c: of 7180 lines, 260 were changed in 2005 (3.6%) 287 were changed in 2004 (4%) snmplib/snmpv3.c: of 1659 lines, 22 were changed in 2005 (<1%) 354 were changed in 2004 (20%) That's pretty much as I'd expect - most of the library should be fairly stable by now (and a lot of those changes are likely to be fairly trivial). I'm actually surprised that so much was done to snmpv3.c last year. Looking at a couple of core elements of the agent: agent/snmpd.c: of 1333 lines, 125 were changed in 2005 (9%) 62 were changed in 2004 (4.6%) agent/agent_registry.c: of 1847 lines, 30 were changed in 2005 (1.6%) 187 were changed in 2004 (10%) Those are probably fairly typical of most of the core elements of the software. Obviously, newer MIB modules will tend to see more active development until they've had time to settle down, but in general, most changes come in short localised bursts. > Likewise how many problems/errors are being reported > and dealt with each year? More than we can cope with! (Though that's probably not the best answer to give you) All of the bugs and problem reports are available via the project Source Forge web pages. Have a look at the 'Bugs' and 'Patches' trackers, and the mailing list archives. I don't have time to count up the rate of bugs (both open and closed) for you, but the mailing list archives do give monthly totals. -coders seems to be running at 400-500 messages a month at the moment, -users is slightly lower (say 300-400). That's partly why I get so annoyed when people send messages to both lists, or repeat the same question two or three times in quick succession. > What is your best guess at how many organisations use the product? > (Or do you know fairly precisely?) > Is it being used in secure environments at all? > Is it being used in safety or mission critical applications? I don't think that any of us know how many organisations use the software. It's being included as part of various O/S distributions, and there's no obligations on users to report back to us. The level of traffic on the mailing lists gives some indication, and we seem to be fairly consistently in the top 100 active projects on Source Forge. Wes has said on occasion that we're better off not knowing where this software is being used, so I suspect that the answer to your last two questions is probably "yes". I'd rather not think about that, if you don't mind! Sorry if that doesn't fully answer your specific questions, but I trust it gives you an indication of the general maturity and stability of the project. Dave ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Splunk Inc. Do you grep through log files for problems? Stop! Download the new AJAX search engine that makes searching your log files as easy as surfing the web. DOWNLOAD SPLUNK! http://ads.osdn.com/?ad_idv37&alloc_id865&op=click _______________________________________________ Net-snmp-coders mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/net-snmp-coders
