Re: devd/devctl

On Friday, September 12, 2003, at 06:26  pm, Suleiman Souhlal wrote:
> 	I was wondering if it would be a good idea to modify devd and devctl 
> for them to handle other events than attaching and detaching devices.. 
> For example, they could be used to mark a network interface as down, 
> when the network cable is pulled out, and run dhclient when it is put 
> back in. I think there are other applications too.

Just something that occured to me in a slightly G&T addled state.

The GNOME folks have this really cool application at the moment called 
'dashboard'.  Basically it works by receiving what they've dubbed 'clue 
packets' from whatever application that you happen to be using at the 
time, and distributing these to multiple backend plugins that either:

   a) rewrite the clue packet so that it contains additional 
information, and/or trigger
      additional clue packets

or

   b) process it in some way, and update the information that's being 
displayed by the
      dashboard

The canonical example they use at the moment is receiving an e-mail 
from someone.  Your e-mail app sends a clue packet with the e-mail 
address of the person you've received it from, and the various backends 
pull out their address details from your address book, a photo, their 
web page link (if your browser knows it), their picture, the last five 
messages they've sent you, and so on, and so forth.

I wonder if this model could be adopted for kernel and system events.  
Instead of a devd, usbd, and others, we need a more generic eventd, 
which can receive events from the kernel, and distribute them to 
backends, which can act on them, or augment them as necessary.

We've reached cruising altitude, so I can't provide web links, but a 
google for 'gnome dashboard' should turn up useful info.

N