I am looking for a way to make a contribution to Gentoo and open source in general. So I'm thinking to myself, "I'm a programmer, why don't I write something?" So here I am. I, however, want to get opinions from other Gentoo users before I embark on this quest.
I'm not asking for volunteers or contributions or anything, just comments on my idea. If everyone else thinks it's a stupid idea, I won't pursue it. Here it is: So I'm emerging some package, watching the endless stream of compiler commandlines scroll across my screen, when I realize, "I really don't care about these command lines all that much. I do, however, really wish that I could find out how far in this build I am." So I do a little thinking, and this is what I came up with: eprogress - a general-purpose hierarchical progress reporting system my vision of the architecture has three components: 1) eprogress progress providers (clients?) (perhaps through some sort of libeprogressc). These are programs like emerge, make, gcc, etc. which have some sort of goal, and can report on their progress. They would need to be patched to provide the system with the progress information. 2) eprogressd (one for each master task, i.e. if you had an emerge and some other make running at the same time, they would be kept separated). the eprogressd would run in the background and keep track of all the progress data. 3) eprogress viewers which communicate with eprogressd to display a representation of the progress data. There could be any number of interchangeable viewers, some for console, some for X11. Some may be specialized to a particular task (such as a special one for emerges), but all would use the same protocol to talk to the eprogressd, which would be kept generic (there could (should?) be some sort of libeprogressviewer to help with this) I would suggest that the system should use UNIX domain sockets or TCP/IP sockets for the communication, especially TCP/IP for the viewer connection. It should not be necessary for the viewer to reside on the same machine as the daemon. Nor, for that matter, should it be necessary for individual tasks to be performed on the same machine. Also, progress information does not have to be limited to a percentage (though that is required). The information could contain many things, like compiler command lines, warnings, errors, einfos etc. Please let me know what you think. -- t3h 3l3ctr0n3rd (John Myers) <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Supermarket Deli Clerk and Student Programmer
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