Re: gnome on FreeBSD [procfs]...

[stephen farrell <stephen farrell org>]

Josh Sled <jsled@scam.xcf.berkeley.edu> writes:

> 0) go through and modify all the programs to work on FreeBSD [PAIN].
>    This might not even be possible... I attempted to do this with wmload
>    a couple of weeks ago, but can't find a way to get nice and free times
>    with getrusage(...)
> 1) Modify FreeBSD's procfs code to support all the linux-like special
>    services.  This might be a bit beyond my ability...
> 2) Encourage the FreeBSD people to do 1...
> 3) Swtich to a "real" flava' of Linux...
> 
> Later next week -- after finals end -- I'll start investigating these
> possibilities...  I'm leaning toward 1), as it [or 2] is the best
> solution...

Um... what about netbsd, openbsd, solaris, irix, digital unix etc
etc??  are you going to encourage their developers to modify them as
well?  what makes you think the linux solution is right in the first
place? (proc filesystem was designed for debuggers to get access to
information about processes (hence the name), not for the kernel to
expose such information--such a mechanism is neat but why in /proc?)

I think a much more portable and workable solution, as has already
been suggested, would be to have libgnome (or whatever) export some
functions to get at this kind of information... and then libgnome
would have some platform-specific code to handle it.

--

Steve Farrell