First Post and Project needs
Andrew Nelson
It's hard to believe that the Zabcon project was started over two years
ago. The first SVN commit was on October 1, 2009.
In that time it's grown from a humble project to something has the
potential to be the defacto tool for CLI access to Zabbix. I say
potential because I feel there is some more work to be done. However it
would not be where it is today if it wasn't for the people who have
helped by writing code, submitting bug reports or keeping the wiki updated.
As I said I believe there is a ways to go, and the only way to get there
is with the help of others. As such I could use help with the following
areas:
* Testing
Zabcon needs more testing, right now it's hard to hit every feature
when before each release, but I hope to have this changed in the
future. There are three basic ways I envision this working, one is to
poke around and try things to see if you can break it. Another is to
write bash scripts which issues commands to Zabcon thus allowing for
consistant testing. Lastly is to help write more Ruby unit tests. I
believe the unit tests are the best choice in the long term.
If you find a bug please open a ticket (if you have access to trac)
or post an email.
* Updating the wiki
The wiki at trac.red-tux.net needs some TLC, there are parts which
are not fully up to date. If you have access please feel free to update
and edit things. If you do not have access please ask and it will be
granted. Right now I am pretty liberal with regards to granting access,
and I intend to keep it this way until someone teaches me to start
locking things down more.
* Back end updates
I am looking for a few trusted people who will be granted ssh access
to the trac.red-tux.net server for some back end maintenance needs. The
two biggest needs as I understand are to keep the trac instance up to
date and to complete the rollout of SSL on that server.
There is also a need to make the current RDoc documentation available
for everyone as well.
* Writing more code
Most of the efforts of the last two years have been mostly my own.
If this project is to scale and grow I need more people to help with
adding new features and fixing bugs.
* Writing better documentation
If you are unsure of how to code but want to learn this is the best
place to start. Presently I am using RDoc to create user readable
documentation, however RDoc is only as good as the comments in the code,
thus this is a great place to start if you don't know Ruby as the
potential impact on the code is minimal, but the potential impact on
helping others is big (in a good way).
* Translations
This is a long term goal. Right now Zabcon only "speaks" (American)
English. Eventually if Zabcon is to be useful to others there need to
be facilities for other languages. Right now I think the best course
would be to discuss how to make this happen and to start steering the
code in that direction. Since all I speak is English I am looking for
someone else to help head up this effort.
* Spread the word
Tell others about Zabcon, find more people who can get involved and help.
Thanks again for everyone's help and support over the last two years,
let's see if we can make the next two better!
-Andrew