Harvard Business School of Echec - system-monitor

API superhero

Benoît Dejean — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 21:30:00 +0200

There's a one 1.4K patch for policykit (now an external depency) support for system-monitor (~7K SLOC) to basically replace 3 lines of gksu. Oh yes i know "it's so much powerfull" (that you have to rewrite kill, renice, etc). I'd rather depend on the new Linux file capabilities...
Kov was already my hero because of the clean design of libgksu API...

He's now my superhero !

WTF

Benoît Dejean — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 13:43:00 +0100

system-monitor is getting famous !
(This is bug#418652.)

GNOME system monitor team

Benoît Dejean — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 19:20:00 +0100

Bienvenue Karl !

Indiana patches

Benoît Dejean — Wed, 13 Jun 2007 14:55:00 +0200

Dear Sun Microsystems, I think your patches are bullshit. Please drop them or as already suggested, do fork.
As the maintainer of system-monitor and libgtop, i have already rejected stupid patches from you. They contain unkown API changes and a lot of dead code. The libgtop patch is the most scary. Here's a tip: libgtop code is OS specific (linux, bsd, solaris, etc have their own separate implementation) so copying linux code to solaris is obviously NOT going to work.
I can see that some of your patches are actually OK, but your people don't seem to understand how we work.
This reminds me of that private mail where you asked me to re-license libgtop to LGPL because you had some kind of packaging issues ... because you wanted to install libgtop in /foo/bar and instead of /foo/baz. Bad for you.

libsexy bugs

Benoît Dejean — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 11:15:00 +0100

Hey chipx86, would you please have a look at libsexy bugzilla ? There are a couple of annoying bugs about sexy_treeview so I had to disable libsexy in system-monitor 2.17.x.

Thanks.

gnome-system-monitor 2.17 has been compromised

Benoît Dejean — Wed, 28 Feb 2007 10:45:00 +0100

Last night, Matthias Clasen and Shaun McCance helped me fix a gnome-doc-utils bug in gnome-system-monitor tarball. I then released gnome-system-monitor-2.17.93 because I am the maintainer.

Then, somebody, who owns a regular svn/ssh account, has commited without approval unreviewed content to gnome-system-monitor trunk. He also tagged the wrong way. And in the end, he released gnome-system-monitor-2.17.94. I don't know anything about this man. I've just got an email from him to tell what he has done. Update: he even created&closed a bug against system-monitor.

gnome-system-monitor 2.17.94 is not official and not trusted at all. DO NOT USE IT.

The following are unreviewed, not trusted and have unknown content :

SVN tag GNOME_SYSTEM_MONITOR_2_17_94 and revision 1935, 1936, 1937 and 1938
gnome-system-monitor 2.17.94 tarballs on the GNOME ftp server.

Today 28/02/2007, only the following are trusted and official :

SVN tag tags/GNOME_SYSTEM_MONITOR_2_17_93 and revisions up to 1934
gnome-system-monitor 2.17.93 tarballs on the GNOME ftp server.

Security infrastructure

It would be nice to be able to GPG-sign tarballs that are uploaded to the GNOME FTP server.

signedness fun

Benoît Dejean — Mon, 12 Feb 2007 11:22:00 +0100

3 years ago, i deleted code that i didn't understand in libgtop. It was a mess about bitwise shift and xor. Then came these bugs about system-monitor displaying 17179869184.0 GiB. This is about available disk space (you know, the 10% reservation for root, etc). On *BSD, available disk space can be negative... so you can get df to reports negative capacity :

$ df -h /
Filesystem      Size    Used   Avail Capacity  Mounted on
/dev/ad10s1a    496M    457M   -514K   100%    /

(This reminds me of mfs fun with OpenBSD

libgtop uses statvfs/statfs functions to get disk space usage : struct statvfs members' type is fsblkcnt_t which is an unsigned integer. This means that some kernels store signed values as unsigned integers. Hence the old fun code i deleted. glibtop_fsusage members are guint64 so there is not signedness mismatch between libgtop and the system.

As I was unable to get negative values with linux 2.6.20 and ext3, I dig into GNU df code and found the very same code that was in libgtop, i guess someone copy&pasted it into libgtop a long time ago. This code does funny things to handle integers with the top bit set as negative integers.

I ended to this madness by ensuring available disk space is <= to free disk space.

Bézier Curves

Benoît Dejean — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 08:39:00 +0100

I have commited a great but simple patch from Lucas Mazzardo Veloso . It uses Bezier Curves to draw the load graph instead of lines thanks to cairo. Sorry, dotclear 2.0-beta5.4 is buggy, i can't attach a screenshot.

Art

Benoît Dejean — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 21:26:00 +0100

I've killed the GNOME logo in System-Monitor's System tab to please people. I'm weak. Now it looks so empty :/

Anyway, thank you crevette, your logo was cool.

Type safety

Benoît Dejean — Sat, 16 Dec 2006 20:35:00 +0100

Converting system-monitor to C++ helped me to spot a lot of small errors. The most common is about enum. For example, gtk_table_attach has arguments of type GtkAttachOptions. Old code used 0 which is not a valid GtkAttachOptions but doesn't yield any warning about this, not even at runtime. Thanks to g++, i've been able to fix these errors.

Moreover, C++ makes me able to write more readable code. I'm trying to convert some C code to C++, and i just can't understand what i meant.

pretty_table->app_hash = g_hash_table_new (NULL, NULL);

pretty_table->default_hash = g_hash_table_new_full (g_str_hash, g_str_equal, g_free, g_object_unref);

No type information. I had to read all the code to remember the purpose of these data. Ugly GUINT_TO_POINTER inside Using C++, i simply use map<string, int> which gives me type information and type safety

I've lost 5 years of work

Benoît Dejean — Thu, 14 Dec 2006 23:15:00 +0100

In the process of converting system-monitor to C++, i had to rename most of the files. I've lost complete history of the whole project

We'll be soon in 2007 and we're still stuck with CVS mid-80 features. Yes, i'm only 3 years older than CVS. I'm ready to move to {git,monotone,mercurial} but now it's too late to avoid damage.

regex

Benoît Dejean — Sat, 09 Dec 2006 18:49:00 +0100

So system-monitor cannot have regular expressions support in order to provide a decent GUI alternative to "lsof | grep". How fast is your python ?