Tuesday, November 08, 2005

New releases for GAP


This weekend Battery Monitor 0.2 and FTP 0.1 were released for the GNUstep Application Project. I hope with this small contribution to help out a bit the GNUstep problem which is, in my opinion, also a general lack of tools and applications.

Battery Monitor checks ACPI and to do this peeks inside the /proc file system. Once again working with it makes me thing on how weak and bad the idea of files versus syscalls is. I am forced to parse files with a useless overhead. Furthermore linux did also a very poor standardization effort and the /proc/acpi changes from laptop to laptop as well as from kernel to kernel version!

Also I have a worried thought for the future, I spread myself thin over a couple of projects now, all of which I think are useful. As I fear to get more busy in the future and as I hit some problems in the current design of the applications, I seriously fear that without external help and collaboration the projects are going to stagnate and be left unfinished, which would be indeed a pity. But it once again reflects another aspect of the GNUstep community.

This also reminds me to tickle Nicola again about the possibility to use kaffe with JIGS! Java integration can only do good to us.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I'd really recommend you take a look at HAL and DBUS. From what I understand they can abstract much of the work of parsing those /proc files for you, and hopefully prevent you from having to deal with their vagaries (which are a pain).