[Psi-devel] new systemwatch_unix

[textshell-I1QKlO at neutronstar.dyndns.org]

On Tue, Jul 03, 2007 at 10:44:45PM +0200, Michał Jazłowiecki wrote:
> 
> What about Unices other than Linux? *BSD systems and Solaris for 
> example. There are quite a few Psi users running those systems. I 
> believe (please correct me, if I'm wrong) that those systems do not 
> provide DBus infrastructure (and its development is way behind the one 
> on Linux), but still take advantage of signals (AFAIR, some signals were 
> renamed on Solaris, like SIGUSR_1 and SIGUSR_2, with underscore and 
> SIGPOWER instead of SIGPWR).

I don't know a lot about non linux unices, but DBus will work on those too.
I'm not sure how much DBus is standard on those, but i'd expect it to be
mostly as standard as it's on linux for most of them (Sun is a big Gnome-
supporter, so it will work on solaris, *BSD support Gnome too and will
have DBus in the ports tree also). Unless somebody knows more about those
systems and has convincing arguments why DBus wouldn't work there, I don't
see why we should use something different. Much less something hacky like
signals, DBus is the freedesktop.org way for things like that, and that's
the closest thing to a standard body in X11 desktop space that matters.
(i even think psi should use DBus on the non X11 platforms, because i'd
like an uniform remote control api, but maybe OS X has something native
that's worth to support....)

> 
> I would prefer Psi to implement one way to support power events on all 
> Unices (that we officially and semi-officially support) than to create 
> Linux-only implementation, then another FreeBSD-only implementation, and 
> another Solaris-specific implementation, and NetBSD-specific... (yes, I 
> do exaggerate now, but you know what I mean). Maybe it's better to 
> implement a generic "work everywhere" solution and try to detect whether 
> a better solution is available.
> 

I'd say it's ok to force people to install DBus on systems that don't
have a standard for things like this. And don't think any of those 
systems have a standard based on signals currently... So the way for 
all unices is DBus IMHO.

 - Martin.