Re: Libgtop HEAD

[Drazen Kacar <dave willfork com>]

Havoc Pennington wrote:

> If no one else speaks up (maybe the load applet authors?), why don't
> you become the libgtop maintainer for now, since you're the main user
> of the lib?

I did the Solaris port, so I suppose I'm the one who is the most familiar
with the thing at the moment. However, I haven't done anything with it in
a long time, so I cannot answer the questions about the code in teh HEAD
without looking in there. There are a few points I would like to make:

1. libgtop is under GPL. I was willing to relicence my code under LGPL,
   but other contributors were not. Bear this in mind if you're basing
   any code on that library.
2. I doubt that it scales (or that the applications based on it scale).
   It can't handle more than 64 processors, for example. I also doubt
   that applications handling processes would be useful on systems with
   1000 or more of them.
3. There is no point in trying to write a library like that without
   having at least 5 operating systems in mind. That translates to the
   team with probably that many persons who are each knowledgeable about
   one OS. libgtop never had that kind of team.
4. The current API sucks; it would need incompatible changes in order to
   be useful accross wider range of operating systems.
5. I never knew where to draw the line between that library and SNMP.

I'm currently pretty much disabled, which gave me a new perspective on
accessibility issues. That's nice, but I doubt I'd be able to answer any
mail during this week. Sorry.

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