Re: [dwm] Crash-only software
On Wed, Jan 14, 2009 at 8:38 PM, Brendan MacDonell wrote: > of kill. The collection of articles seems to imply that 'crash-only' > refers to the usage of rebootable components and frequent saving of > persistent state to cope with errors instead of using more complex > error recovery mechanisms. In fact, since dwm doesn't have any > persistent state and consists of a single logical module, I'd have thought it was the usual "issue" from the X-server/WM split: dwm does have some slightly-complicated client state, but it's predicated upon the X server having the appropriate clients at appropriate pointers, keeping the geometry, etc. So there's not a huge difference between a restart-from-crash and a restart-with-initialisation if it can't trust the X-server to be in an identical state. -- cheers, dave tweed__ computer vision reasearcher: david.tw...@gmail.com "while having code so boring anyone can maintain it, use Python." -- attempted insult seen on slashdot
Re: [dwm] Crash-only software
> What do you think about the concept of crash-only software? While I'm certain that it's great for large, complex, high-availability applications which infrequently write persistent state to disk, I don't think it's of much use for small software components. Such programs are unlikely to be able to architecturally differentiate between micro-reboots and macro-reboots, not to mention that the average consumer-grade application already supports auto-saving and can start up cleaning in a short period of time - even moreso for suckless programs. > What about removing the running flag from dwm and replacing quit() > with kill(pid)? My interpretation of the original paper's statement that 'stop=crash' was that a crash and a stop instruction are considered equivalent, ie. that there is no path dedicated to storing resources on shutdown which would be unavailable in the case of a crash, and not that an application should have no method to cleanly exit and require the use of kill. The collection of articles seems to imply that 'crash-only' refers to the usage of rebootable components and frequent saving of persistent state to cope with errors instead of using more complex error recovery mechanisms. In fact, since dwm doesn't have any persistent state and consists of a single logical module, Neale's script _would_ arguably make it crash only software. Brendan MacDonell
Re: [dwm] Crash-only software
[2009-01-14 13:36] Neale Pickett > > But if you're enamoured of the idea, here's something you can do from > your .xinitrc to get this behavior. This will work better with dwm 5.4 > than with a prior version. > > while ! dwm; do true; done That was not what I intended with my post. I already know about that. The questions are more: What do you think about the concept of crash-only software? and What about removing the running flag from dwm and replacing quit() with kill(pid)? Probably dwm is not the most relevant program to become crash-only software, but I think it's worth a thought. meillo signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: [dwm] Crash-only software
I'd be more inclined to consider this if dwm had ever had a problem in the year or so I've been using it. But if you're enamoured of the idea, here's something you can do from your .xinitrc to get this behavior. This will work better with dwm 5.4 than with a prior version. while ! dwm; do true; done Neale
[dwm] Crash-only software
Hoi, have you ever heard of crash-only software? Might this be a concept to improve dwm? Is it possible at all, to make dwm a crash-only software? This is just a thought, because I stumpled upon the concept and think it's a quite interesting approach. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crash-only_software meillo signature.asc Description: Digital signature
