Re: New libgtop maintainer

[Robert Roth <robert roth off gmail com>]

On Sat, Aug 10, 2013 at 2:42 PM, Matthias Clasen <matthias clasen gmail com> wrote:

On Fri, Aug 9, 2013 at 4:31 PM, Robert Roth <robert roth off gmail com> wrote:


> My goals for the 3.12 cycle (as we're getting close to the 3.9 freeze, only
> for the next cycle) are to review the buglist of the module, and extend it
> to provide library support for various gnome-system-monitor enhancement
> requests, but in the meantime keep it simple and fast enough to back the
> upcoming Usage application.

Tbh, I think it would be good to start out by reevaluating the
rationale for this library. Do we really need it anymore ? What data
does g-s-m get from it ?

For storage-related data, gio has probably
encroached into the territory already.

You might be right on that, I will check what GIO can do.

For other data, libgtop is
mostly a thin wrapper of /proc, iirc.

Thas is true for linux systems, but libgtop also supports some BSDs, and other systems, which don't seem to have a procfs and e.g. control-center uses the sysinfo requested from libgtop, implemented as a thin /proc wrapper on linux, and as a bunch of sysctl calls on OpenBSD (these are the two implementations I have checked now, the OpenBSD implementation being the "most active" libgtop port, and the linux one for obvious reasons). So even if we only look at getting the number of cores, this is an information we need both in System Monitor and Control Center, and dropping libgtop would mean we'd have to implement at least for Linux and OpenBSD in both GCC and GSM, which is obvious code duplication, something to avoid, if we already have it in one place.

I could be wrong, of course.

I'm open for discussion on the topic, but I would say that libgtop should be kept and developed further as the library to get system info in GNOME projects. Please share your ideas, thoughts on the topic.

Robert
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Robert Roth