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Naemon is a host/service/network monitoring program written in C and released under the GNU General Public License. It works by scheduling checks of the configured objects and then invoking plugins to do the actual checking. The plugin interface is 100% Nagios compatible, since Naemon is a fork of the aforementioned project.

Contributing to Naemon is meant to be easy, fun and profitable. I'm not sure where the profit will come from, but if you get a warm glow of pride when getting a patch accepted, you can consider that your reward if you like.

The easiest way is probably to fork this project on github, and then send pull requests to the original project. You can also send patches to [email protected].

Commit messages MUST contain a Signed-off-by line and have a proper author name and email address (even though "Anonhacker42 [email protected] is considered "proper" in these circles). If you run git commit -s you'll get the signed-off-by for free. The signed-off-by indicates that you're telling us you have the right to submit this patch and that we shouldn't worry about lawyers from whatever company you're working for will come at us later and demand that we remove your contributions from the code. It might not be much of a protection against such things, but it's more or less standard praxis in the git-using projects, so please just stick to it, ok?

Messages MUST contain a brief statement of why the change was made. "Fix bugs" is a bad message, as it means people will have to know which bugs you're fixing. "Make sure we don't segfault when the disk is full" is a useful message, because it points to a problem and makes it clear that the patch should fix it. In case deep analysis was required in order to figure out the root cause of the problem, you're encouraged to also write your findings there. It also makes it look as if you did a whole lot of work and did it thoroughly, which is pretty good for your resumé.

Messages SHOULD be written in imperative form, as if you're giving the code orders on how it should change. It provides a much nicer basis for discussion when a patch has to be reviewed online, as it indicates that the change is about to take place but is open for discussion rather than that it already has and that discussion isn't welcome.

Messages SHOULD have lines shorter than 72 chars. Most of the time, people will inspect logs or blame output in a terminal or in a limited width program, and it's a pain to have to scroll sideways all the time to see the message. Please keep the lines short and it'll save some annoyance on behalf of other people.

Common sense applies.

• Don't break backwards compatibility without a really good reason.
• Don't remove or alter API's unless absolutely necessary.
• Don't write huge functions that do a lot. It's hard to test those, and we do like tests.
• Use the indentation already found in the files, or reindent to your liking and then run "sh indent-all.sh" when you're done. That should bring the tree back to some semblance of unity.
• Avoid sending patches with a lot of whitespace changes. They're hard to review so they probably won't be.
• Don't engage in useless codechurn. If the patch you're submitting doesn't solve an actual problem or paves the way for solving some sort of problem or adding a feature, it's most likely not worth the trouble.

When installing from a released tarball, all you need to do is to run

./configure
make
sudo make install

If you want to help out with development and hence download the source from git, you instead need to run

./autogen.sh
make
sudo make install

Visit the Naemon homepage at http://naemon.org