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

[Robin Sommer]

All good questions. We still have a lot figure out with all of this,
would certainly be nice to be able to do "yum install bro-my-plugin".
Right now the only built-in way to distribute plugins as binaries is
"make bdist" with provided skeleton Makefile: that builds tarball with
everything that the plugin needs at runtime.

I also realized another problem (maybe) with the current skeleton for
writing plugins: it doesn't keep things nicely inside a single build
directory, as we usually do with all cmake-built stuff (there's a
reason for why not, but a few sylinks could probably solve that).

Anyways, I would still like to go ahead with things just as they are
now (assuming we manage to not break anything/much). Nothing's cast in
stone, but I think it will work better to work this out once things
are in master so that people start using it.

Robin

On Wed, Aug 06, 2014 at 21:38 +0000, you wrote:

> Are there any plans for packaging plugins and pushing those into
> various distributions' repositories (e.g. CentOS, Debian, FreeBSD)? 
> 'sudo yum install bro-2.4-elasticsearch-writer' seems like it would be
> pretty convenient for users, assuming there are plans to support it.
> On a related note, it seems like individual maintainers could acquire
> blessed status pretty quickly without getting the bro team involved by
> pushing their individual plugin upstream somewhere: anything that 'yum
> search bro-plugin' (or equivalent) yields would probably be assumed to
> be somewhat stable (or at least stable enough to install without
> thinking about it too hard first :)
> 
> Are there plans to package a bro-2.4-plugin-devel or equivalent to
> make it possible for the folks who have installed bro via e.g. apt or
> yum to build plugins without having to also pull down and compile a
> complete version of bro?  I think this could make plugin development
> quite a bit more accessible for new folks, assuming the overhead of
> maintaining such a package wasn't unreasonable.
> 
> -Gilbert
> ________________________________________
> From: bro-dev-bounces at bro.org <bro-dev-bounces at bro.org> on behalf of Robin Sommer <robin at icir.org>
> Sent: Wednesday, August 06, 2014 3:17 PM
> To: Seth Hall
> Cc: bro-dev at bro.org
> Subject: Re: [Bro-Dev] Organizing plugins (Re: [JIRA]   (BIT-1222)      topic/robin/reader-writer-plugins)
> 
> On Wed, Aug 06, 2014 at 12:33 -0400, you wrote:
> 
> > I don't like that stuff might not automatically build.  Would it be
> > possible to have the plugins add stuff to bro's configure output?  So
> > that plugins that are available and able to find their dependencies
> > automatically build?
> 
> Hmmm ... Not sure I like that. To me these separately maintained
> plugins are optional things that shouldn't be pulled in automatically.
> Would you say they should also install automatically? What about those
> that don't even have external dependencies? Would they always be
> installed/loaded?
> 
> Also, if we integrated them into the central configure, we'd probably
> also need to provide their options, like --with-dataseries=/path/to/ds ...
> 
> Robin
> 
> --
> Robin Sommer * Phone +1 (510) 722-6541 *     robin at icir.org
> ICSI/LBNL    * Fax   +1 (510) 666-2956 * www.icir.org/robin
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> 


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