[collectd] RFC: Should we maintain plugins written in Go?

[Florian Forster]

Hi everybody,

TL,DR: Should we create a new Git repository and maintain plugins 
written in the "Go" programming language?

the last days, I spent some time improving the "collectd.org/plugin" 
package [0]. In a nutshell, it allows to implement a plugin in Go, 
compile it to a shared object and then load it like other "native" 
(implemented in C) plugins. The primary benefit over approaches such as 
the "collectd.org/exec" [1] and "collectd.org/rpc" [2] packages is, that 
it supports implementing "write" and "log" callbacks. "config" 
callbacks, allowing one to configure the plugin via the collectd config 
file, are work in progress.

My question is: Should we attempt to maintain plugins written in Go? And 
if so, how?

For Go-based plugins, i.e. plugins based on "collectd.org/plugin", I 
propose we create a separate repository, e.g. 
github.com/collectd/go-plugins, and maintain those there. This would 
make plugins easier to discover for users, allow easier changes to the 
API, and strive for consistency across the ecosystem.

In the past, we have imported plugins in non-C languages into the main 
repository, in particular bindings/perl/ and bindings/java/. This model 
is not a good fit for Go, which makes much more assumptions about the 
directory structure of a repository. Also, for Perl and Java the "glue 
code" (code translating between Perl and Java, and C) is contained in 
the "main" reposiroty; that's not the case for Go.

I'm also contemplating if we should try to support plugins using the 
"exec plugin" more, e.g. by creating a repository for them. There are a 
number of "collectd Docker" plugins and I feel like this duplication 
could have been avoided by better discoverability.

Best regards,
—octo

[0] https://godoc.org/collectd.org/plugin
[1] https://godoc.org/collectd.org/exec
[2] https://godoc.org/collectd.org/rpc
-- 
collectd – The system statistics collection daemon
Website: http://collectd.org
GitHub:  https://github.com/collectd
Twitter: http://twitter.com/collectd