[kubuntu-devel] Guidance on Kubuntu

[Sebastian Kügler]

Hi,

CC:'d who seemed to be relevant gnome / ubuntu guys. 
Here's a short summary for the people who have not been following the 
whole discussion:

We're working on a tool for the kubuntu desktop to manage system 
services (http://www.simonzone.com/software/guidance/). The bits we're 
lacking are

* Description of the services
* A reliable way to detect whether a service is started 

On Tuesday 12 July 2005 14:50, Luke Monahan wrote:
> On Tue, 12 Jul 2005 22:13 pm, Sebastian Kügler wrote:
> > > > > 2. Where do I get the status of an init.d script?  In
> > > > > Mandrake the technique is to use:
> > > > >
> > > > > /etc/init.d/scriptname status
> > > > > and read the standard output.  Unfortunately none of the
> > > > > scripts in init.d seem to support the "status" command line
> > > > > option.  Any ideas on how to retrieve the current status of
> > > > > an init.d script in Kubuntu?
> > > >
> > > > I think you will need to ask on ubuntu-devel for that, I can't
> > > > see any easy way to do either unfortunatly.
> >
> > This still has to be solved, but it seems non-trivial. As far as
> > .pid files are created, I think I've covered them. But a lot of the
> > stuff doesn't use .pid files, so I'm kinda lost. Suggestions are,
> > of course, welcome. About 1/3 of the services's statuses are
> > currently detected on my system, to give you an idea.
>
> The solution being proposed around the ubuntu wiki is to have a map
> of all services to human descriptions and daemon process names that
> can be used to detect the script status.  Obviously a bit of a hack,
> hard to maintain for _every_ service in the universe repo and some of
> the scripts don't easily map to a single daemon.  BUM (the Gnome
> service manager) is doing it this way.
>
> For reference:  https://wiki.ubuntu.com/InitScriptHumanDescriptions

Ah, good to know that there's work, at least going on.

> The only alternative I see is to start imposing a "status" flag on
> every package that gets into the repository that has an sysV init
> script.  Others can probably tell me how impossible that will be to
> do :)  If that does happen then the opportunity should be taken to
> put the human descriptions into the script also, as getting them from
> dpkg-cache is pretty slow.

I'm also interested how "undoable" such kind of thing is. There 
obviously *is* a need for such a thing. (We could still use the dpkg 
method as a fallback, of course).

Of course, I'm ready to hack all that into guidance. The fact that we're 
not the only ones that would like to use this makes it possible to 
spread the work. 

Also, localized descriptions sound pretty interesting though they 
definitely should be shared between KDE and GNOME.

Matthew, Fabio, what is your status on this? How are you planning to 
distribute this list? I.e. as a separate package, list somewhere online 
that can be updated by developers and/or maintainers, standard part of 
some existing packages, ...?

Cheers,
-- 
sebas

 http://www.kde.nl | http://vizZzion.org |  GPG Key ID: 9119 0EF9 
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