Re: [Tracker] Showing trackerd's status in ps and top output

["Jeff Schroeder" <jeffschroed gmail com>]

On Jan 2, 2008 7:30 PM, Michael Biebl <mbiebl gmail com> wrote:
> 2008/1/3, Jeff Schroeder <jeffschroed gmail com>:
> > A few days ago while staring at ps and tracker was grinding my hard
> > drive, it occurred to me, "Wouldn't it be nice if trackerd showed its
> > status in ps / top?".
>
> [..]
>
> Are such hacks really necessary? I mean, you can easily query
> trackerd's status via tracker-status and also the D-Bus interface.
Well on systems that support it via prctl or setproctitle, I don't see how
it is a hack? It is *really* nice to look at top and see: trackerd (Indexing).
It isn't like I'm saying we should switch tracker to lucene and I'm even
offering to do the coding. If you are dead set against it please say so
again. I'd rather work on a project that accepts small contributions.

> I'd rather keep tracker as simple (and portable) as possible.
So what are tracker's target operating systems? I named solutions
for Solaris, Linux, and the bsds. Instead of the complexity of making
a query with dbus-send or having to call tracker-status, why NOT
allow someone to see the status with ps? Please don't take this as
a flame. This isn't going to bloat or slow down the core of trackerd.

Yes the Solaris solution is ugly, but setproctitle and prctl are not hacks.

My original patch was along the lines of simple:
#if defined(__linux__) && defined(HAVE_PRCTL_SET_NAME)
prctl(...
#endif

With the necessary macros added to the configure.ac to check
for prctl(PR_SET_NAME support. This is Linux only. Then I noticed sun
engineers post to the list and thought I might try to find a solution that
works in more places that just Linux and found out how hal / avahi does it.

-- 
Jeff Schroeder

Don't drink and derive, alcohol and analysis don't mix.
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