Re: New libgtop maintainer

[Robert Roth <robert roth off gmail com>]

On Sun, Aug 11, 2013 at 1:49 PM, Antoine Jacoutot <ajacoutot gnome org> wrote:

On Sun, Aug 11, 2013 at 01:13:40PM +0300, Zeeshan Ali (Khattak) wrote:
> On Sat, Aug 10, 2013 at 3:09 PM, Robert Roth <robert roth off gmail com> wrote:
> > 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
>
> Before we take this fact into consideration here, perhaps we should
> first find out if a modern GNOME system actually work on BSD. We

It does. I am actually running a full GNOME 3.8.3 installation on OpenBSD.
And part of my job is to deploy such combo on hundreds of machines.

For me this is a pretty good and solid argument for keeping libgtop as an abstraction layer for getting system information, even if we would only have OpenBSD and linux-based systems using GNOME, even if there would be only these two implementations (but there are some more).

In fact keeping everything up-to-date, buildable and ported to each system seems like the biggest challenge for me in maintaining libgtop, and would appreciate users of non-linux based OSs using GNOME willing to help sending me a note to know who can test newly ported/help porting new code.

Robert