[Bro-Dev] Organizing plugins (Re: [JIRA] (BIT-1222) topic/robin/reader-writer-plugins)

[Robin Sommer]

On Wed, Aug 06, 2014 at 00:04 +0000, you wrote:

> Was there more concern regarding admin overhead other than the initial
> cost of setting-up/mirroring?  Is there a limit to how many repos can
> be mirrored?

No, it's indeed mostly the setup, plus the potential messiness of
having 1000s of individial repositories show up when somebody goes to
github (to be a bit overly optimistic :-)

> Could also do a hybrid approach where only external plugins are
> submodules, but internally maintained ones just get committed directly
> to main "bro-plugin” repo.  That would cut down on the admin overhead.

I like this model. Keeping our own stuff in a single repo feels more
convinient to me, but I can see pulling in external ones separately.
And we'd still have "vetting power" becaue we have to move the
submodule forward.

> Another worry: should the way plugins are organized make it easy to be
> selective about which plugins to build/install ?

Yes, actually I think so. Building/testing all together is convenient,
but I'm not sure it should be the default (*installing* all together
should pretty certainly not be the default). So I'm thinking to do it
selectively, with the option to do them all. Maybe that's just a
top-level Makefile with individual targets
{build,install,test}-dataseries, {build,install}-elasticsearch, and
then an overall {build,install,test}-all. In addition one can also
always go to the subdirectories individually and build there, they are
all supposed to build standalone as well.

So do we want to go ahead with this model? Then I'd set that up and
move DS and ES over.

One more question: would we then want to pull bro-plugin as a
submodule into bro/aux? Then people would automatically get the stuff
there as well (but it wouldn't be build automatically), and it would
allow for easier testing as it's clear where things are located.

Robin


-- 
Robin Sommer * Phone +1 (510) 722-6541 *     robin at icir.org
ICSI/LBNL    * Fax   +1 (510) 666-2956 * www.icir.org/robin