Dear maintainer,
it would be nice if `check-support-status` provided machine-readable
output. It seems the "NAGIOS plugin format" has become a kind of
de-facto standard for these things, since it can be read by multiple
monitoring solutions.
For example: needrestart has the option `-p` which outputs relevant
information in this format.
Looking at
https://assets.nagios.com/downloads/nagioscore/docs/nagioscore/3/en/pluginapi.html
and https://nagios-plugins.org/doc/guidelines.html#AEN200
it would be pretty easy to make the current output compatible by
prepending a line, like:
OK - All fine | packages=0;;0;0
or
WARN - Limited security support for one or more packages | packages=3;;0;0
but changing the return value might be considered a breaking change, so
maybe adding an additional option (like needrestart does) might be the
better way.
Regards, Tobias