Re: [RFC] Dell Activity LED daemon and udev rule

[Bob Rodgers <Robert_Rodgers dell com>]

> On 3/2/2010 1:31 AM, Dan Williams wrote:
>> On Mon, 2010-03-01 at 16:43 -0600, Bob Rodgers wrote:
>> 
>> We have written a trivial example python program that will turn
>> on the LED based on network up/down state as determined by the
>> NetworkManager dbus interface. We would like to have this
>> Activity LED work out of the box on any NetworkManager-enabled
>> distribution and would like to propose two additions to
>> NetworkManager: 1) Activity LED daemon and 2) udev rule to launch
>> the Activity LED daemon.
> 
> Interesting; this could either be the python that you have, or if I
> end up adding the global connected/disconnected events to the
> dispatcher, it could be a very simple dispatcher shellscript too.
> 
> I'm not quite sure how to handle this at the moment as we don't
> have any sort of NetworkManager-extras, but I'm happy to put it
> into the examples/ directory for the time being.  Distros could
> then add some packaging rules to copy the files from the NM tarball
> into the correct place during NM package build.
> 
> For Fedora maybe we'd create an auxiliary RPM called something
> like "NetworkManager-dell-activity-led" that users could
> install/remove at will to get the functionality.
> 
> Is that the sort of thing you were thinking?
> 
> Dan
> 
 
Thanks, Dan. Yes, we were looking specifically for feedback on if "something" could be included upstream and if so, what form that "something" would be. From your reply, it looks like we could get something in the upstream NM tarball. Once there, we would work with Ubunto (or Fedora), for example, to get them to drop it into their packaging.

Here are the two approaches mentioned:
1 Daemon:
  + only runs on demand on applicable machines
  - approx 8MB memory usage for python daemon, possibly much less for a C/Glib daemon

2 Dispatcher:
  + only runs on demand
  - possibly runs on machines where it isn't needed

Do you have a preference with regard to which we should pursue?

Bob