[Bro-Dev] package manager progress

[Azoff, Justin S]

> On Jul 27, 2016, at 11:44 AM, Seth Hall <seth at icir.org> wrote:
> 
> 
>> On Jul 25, 2016, at 4:49 PM, Azoff, Justin S <jazoff at illinois.edu> wrote:
>> 
>> In one aspect the pktsrc- prefix acts like a tag, but can also help disambiguate plugins... i.e., a redis log writer plugin vs. a redis data store plugin vs. a redis protocol analyzer.
> 
> I actually don't like this that much because some of these can cross boundaries and do all sorts of different things in a single plugin.  It makes more sense to me to leave the naming open.  If people want to name a plugin with a prefix, they're free to, but I wouldn't want to discourage people from maintaining individual plugins that provide a variety of features.
> 
>  .Seth

We really need to do this though, the end result otherwise will be chaos.  Package names shouldn't have a generic name just because it was the first one in the repository.

Leaving it open will lead to:

The first person that writes a redis plugin for log writing calls it 'redis'.
Then a redis analyzer is called 'redis-analyzer' 
Then someone writes a redis input source and that gets called 'input-source-redis'

Then a postgres analyzer is written and named 'postgresql'.
Then a postgres log writer plugin is named 'postgresql-log-writer'. 
Then an input source is written named 'postgresql-input-source'.

So a year later we end up with packages named:

redis
redis-analyzer
input-source-redis
postgresql
postgresql-log-writer
postgresql-input-source


Where 'redis' is a log writer plugin and 'postgresql' is an analyzer. 

Where the input source plugins are interchangeably named input-source-redis and postgresql-input-source.

If someone wanted to write a redis plugin that was both an input source, an analyzer, and a log writer, that could be called 'redis'... letting anything else be called 'redis' is confusing and misleading.


-- 
- Justin Azoff