Elektrified X.org released (was: X configuration paradigm, and a proposal)

[Sean Middleditch]

On Wed, 2004-12-01 at 16:44 -0300, Avi Alkalay wrote:
> On Wed, 01 Dec 2004 13:29:28 -0500, Sean Middleditch
> <elanthis at awesomeplay.com> wrote:
> > > Notifications is there already. Check the code. Transactions needs
> > > some stabilization, yes.
> > 
> > Your notifications API is a gross hack.  It might be the best you can do
> > without a daemon, but it's still practically unusable.  Discussed
> > already in another message.
> 
> Just to let you know, I studied FAM source code to learn how to do
> that. And surprisingly, it simply polls the monitored files :-) Oh

And FAM is hated by just about every person who has ever used it.  See
Gamin and iNotify for the modern replacements that actually work.  ~_^

> yes, it has a compilation option to use a kernel module called imon,
> which is an SGI contribution proted from IRIX. But now guess: imon is
> not in the kernel. So just to make it clear, FAM POLLS THE MONITORED
> FILES, so Elektra monitoring is as good as FAM.

FAM actually used dnotify when available as well.  And, again, FAM
sucks.

> 
> Well, this is not an excuse to make it this bad way, but since Elektra
> is completely decentralized and not a single point of failure, I
> couldn't find a way to make it more efficiently. You are welcome to
> contribute, though :-)
> 
> And you want to know more?
> Only desktop applications need monitoring. Actually Gnome likes
> monitoring for fancy things like having the entire desktop theme
> change when you click on a different one inside a dialog. Or you want
> /sbin/init to instantly change its runlevel after changing the
> runlevel key?  So the point is: notification needs are application
> specific, and Elektra implements the very bottom of the infrastructure
> needed to support it, because this is the scope of Elektra.

Only desktop apps?  I'd love to have my network interfaces auto-update
when I change them.  I'd love to see X recognize hot-plugged hardware.
I'd be more than happy if Apache, MySQL, or any of a number of other
server daemons would Just Work(tm) after tweaking a config, versus
having to manually restart them.

And then, my point is, Elektra *does not* implement the bottom of the
infrastructure needed to support notification.  Elektra is completely
unsuited to handling notification.  Any system wanting accurate, timely,
efficient notification of key changes will need to sit *above* Elektra
entirely, which would actually preclude Elektra from use, as Elektra
would provide the ability to circumvent said system by allowing users to
change keys without going through the higher level layer capable of real
transactions and notification.

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-- 
Sean Middleditch <elanthis at awesomeplay.com>
AwesomePlay Productions, Inc.