[Popcon-developers] popcon for smolt quickhack

[Dan Kegel]

On Mon, Jul 20, 2009 at 2:54 PM, Sebastian
Pipping<webmaster at hartwork.org> wrote:
> Dan Kegel wrote:
>> Yep.  I would expect system probes like smolt and popcon
>> to be written carefully in C with minimal dependencies to
>> make darn sure they don't affect the system...
>
> That's not status quo at all.

I didn't say that's how they were written; that's how they should be written.

> Dependencies only go away but writing all the wheels your own.

Not necessarily.  You can statically link the app.   Then you can
use third party libraries without screwing up the statistics.

> We shouldn't do that for a number of reasons.
> The language we choose has little influence to that in my current
> understanding.

Not at all true.  Choosing language X means that language X
will be included in the statistics.  C and sh are the only languages
absolutely positively available on all systems without skewing
statistics.

> Think cross-distribution software statistics in the near future.
> I have about 1300 packages installed on my machine, others maybe more.
> Wouldn't it be worth it if there were say even 50 of them that we cannot
> get accurate stats for?

Depends.  If you're trying to do a first-class job that won't need
to be redone later, perhaps not.

> Please try to be a bit more constructive, we currently don't get anywhere.

I was only offering an observation about a best practice that
should be followed when writing stuff that you want to
deploy everywhere.  You're free to ignore my drive-by comment.

(Anybody remember how awfully slow Fedora 9 was to start up?  It turned
out that a big part of the problem was that they wrote a little update
notifier throbber in Python, and it used 64 MB just to flash a tiny notifier
icon.  This was pretty awful back then, when systems didn't have much
RAM.  This is the kind of memory that reinforces my feeling that
core stuff should be as lightweight as possible, and be written with
the user rather than the developer in mind.)
- Dan