libgtop (Was: Write up of GNOME BOF)

[Drazen Kacar <dave willfork com>]

Glynn Foster wrote:

> I did a couple of slides a while back for novelty factor, but didn't
> actually use them [hence the non-polished factor] -
> 
> 	http://www.maths.tcd.ie/~gfoster/guadec_slide/img0.html

> Unmaintainable Modules -
> ========================
> 
> This is the real problem in that they are both buggy and no one
> wants to hack on them eg. gnome-session, libgtop, sawfish etc..

A brief comment about libgtop: that's a devilishly hard thing to do
properly. The library is supposed to retrieve system configuration
and run-time information and export it via unified and stable API to the
applications.

At one point there was a POSIX working group which tried to craft a
standard API for things like processor manipulation, processor sets,
binding apps to them and the like. They couldn't reach consensus, so we
don't have POSIX API for that today.

Yet, libgtop should come out with exactly that API somehow. I'm still
interested in libgtop and I might even find some time to work on it, but I
don't know nearly enough to come up with the API. Implementation has never
been a big problem (for me, at least). Except that the existing code base
is under GPL, but that's not exactly my problem.

-- 
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