Requirements for ‘Vetted Plugins’

This is a draft paper written in 2009 by niclan and dipohl. It should be reviewed, completed (at least merged with the docs for plugin contributors, that were published on github) and then decreed by the developer team.

Purpose is to define requirements for quality plugins that get starred / recommended in the plugin gallery and also may be accepted for the official distribution of munin-node.

Usability

Vetted plugins should work well out of the box, and should autoconf correctly in most cases. The Concise guide to plugin authoring describes plugins methods autoconf and suggest.

Their graph should be significant and easy to comprehend. See the Guide for good plugin graphs.

Security

Important demands should be added here..

Documentation

POD Style documentation in the plugin (See Munin documentation for the details)

Examples on what information should be included in a plugin POD can be found in apache and buddyinfo (here contribution includes also example graph images for the Munin Plugin Gallery :-)

Packaging

Vetted plugins shouldn’t conflict with plugins in other packages as well (ie: plugins in munin-node or munin-plugins-extra).

These plugins can go in $(DESTDIR)/usr/share/munin/plugins.