Moving the roadmap from the file in the repository to an issue/issues here.
It was not maintained and here it can be used for communication.
Follow up to #2066 .

Releases in the 1.3 series will be for development. Version 1.4.0 will
be the next full production release. I am not planning on dates right now,
but you can expect maintennence releases for 1.2.9 as well.

With that done, it's time to figure out what we are doing for release
1.3 development. I have a few ideas. Maybe others do as well.

DOCUMENTATION:
We pretty much have decided that we will doing something along
the lines of a literate programming model. So far, we have site
documentation in DocBook. I have some ideas here, which I will
discuss in a separate thread.

OPTION PROCESSING:
I believe we can remove reverse compatibility for non-Getopt
option specifications. For example, 'check_ping 1 2 3 4 -p 2'
would not be supported anymore. Support for this is a hack,
and making it portable is bug-prone. We should also review
standardization of our options -- the current list is a little
ad hoc, it should be nailed down. Details in a separate thread.

Also,

check_http -p 443 --ssl www.infoplease.com

should be fine, but if the getopt in use does not natively support it,
things like

check_http www.infoplease.com -p 443 --ssl

should be trapped and result in a call to one of the usage macros
(which print a message and then exit STATE_UNKNOWN).

This means that the call_getopt() function can go away. It's an
inconsistent mess and I'd love to ditch it. I only created it to
satisfy people that wanted reverse compatibility and did not have
GNU getopt.

But I would like to urge that all standard plugins contain
validate_arguments(). I think this will help convey the idea that
validations should be done, even if we don't insist on the specific
extent that each plugin must do that validation.

This is the set of standard options I envision:

Reserved:

-h, --help (REQUIRED!!!!!)
-V, --version (REQUIRED!!!!!)
-v, --verbose
-q, --quiet
-t, --timeout = INTEGER (senonds)
-c, --critical = (INT|FLOAT|RANGE|LIST) 
-w, --warning = (INT|FLOAT|RANGE|LIST)
-H, --hostname = STRING
-F, --file = STRING (usually input) 
-O, --output = STRING (output file) 

Recommended, but not reserved:

-I, --ipaddress = STRING
-C, --community = STRING
-a, --auth(info) = STRING (authentication or password) 
-l, --logname = STRING
-p, --password = STRING
-P, --port = INT
-u, --url = STRING (also --username if --url is not needed)

I am suggesting that port always be -P (uppercase) -- we are
currently inconsistent in that regard.

I am also adding -q for silent running. This is totally self
centered--I am planning to use a plugin in a cron script, and I
don't want nightly emails.

As has been the case, ranges are specified with colons, like i:j
and list are specified with commas like i,k and may contain ranges
if it makes sense to do so. Perhaps it would be good to build a
standard list/range processing function for this task.

Programming:
I would like to follow the GNU guidelines and remove all fixed
length character assignments, at least to the extent possible,
from the C-based plugins. To that end, I have made strscpy and
friends in utils.c -- I'd like to deploy them. I have comments
that there is a lot of duplicated code, and techniques used that
should be cleaned up. Details in a separate thread.

Remote checks:
I have a proposal in hand to incorporate ssh check into spopen()
so that remote machine checks can be seamless. A nice idea, but
complex enough to require discussion. Another thread.

I also have a wish list, and I'm sure I've forgot some items. I'll
list mine, please respond with other items that can be put into the
sourceforge task manager:

• Indent all code in a GNU-compatible manner (indent -ts 2 -br)
• Add RAND_seed to check_http for --ssl on systems without /dev/random
• Add regex filtering to check_procs --args option
• Add working procs syntax for AIX check_procs
• Allow check_disk to exclude non-local disks
• Add md5 checksumming to check_http
• Complete unification of check_tcp and friends
• Add SSL in a general way to check_tcp and friends
• Patches to check_log from Joonas
• Add calculator engine and snmpwalk to check_snmp
• Is there a bug in check_oracle
• Are there outstanding bugs in check_snmp
• Change check_http --onredirect to default as STATE_UNKNOWN
• Create plugin to check tftp servers
• Create plugin wrapper to invert error status