Hi list,
I started this discussion on the unconference in San Diego last week and
I want to bring this to the Community now.
I would like to propose that we discontinue the development of the
reference Capture Agent after 1.4.
We would not delete the current code from the repo or something like
this, bit we will not really maintain the code in the future so that it
will be outdated in the near future, because hardware that we recommend
is no longer available or interfaces and drivers that we use will
change. We will need to create a mockup-capture-agent (a simpler version
of the current demo capture agent) that will prove that our API is still
working and can be used for integration tests. This Mockup-Agent will
probably have no 3rd-party dependencies like the current agents so that
it can be installed on any test server.
Why should we discontinue the development?
Currently only 2 developers are working part time on the CA. We hardly
manage to catch up on know bugs. We hardly manage to keep the install
scrips up to date with changes that come with new Ubuntu versions. We
have not really improved the functionality of capture agent in the last
releases. A good example for that is that the CA user interface still
lacks any usability. On the other hand we have to compete with other
open source implementations of capture agents and the commercial
vendors, which improve their software much more rapidly. Especially
Teltek's Galicaster is an valid alternative to the reference Capture
Agent as it has an open source license too and works on very similar
hardware. Most adopters that currently use the reference CA could switch
to Galicaster.
By switching away from our own implementation we as a community could
open up the discussion with the Capture Agent developers about
improvements of the Ingest-API. With our own CA we would need to write
an reference implementation. Now we would only need to update the
Mockup-Agent to test the interface.
If we would encounter in the future that we rely too much on commercial
partners with their Capture Agents we could always use our old code
again and update it again.
I would like to know what the community thinks about this proposal?
Thanks
Rüdiger
--
________________________________________________
Rüdiger Rolf, M.A.
Universität Osnabrück - Zentrum virtUOS
Heger-Tor-Wall 12, 49069 Osnabrück
Telefon: (0541) 969-6511 - Fax: (0541) 969-16511
E-Mail: rr...@uni-osnabrueck.de
Internet: www.virtuos.uni-osnabrueck.de
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