xhotplugd -- project idea

[Chris Hanson <cph@zurich.ai.mit.edu>]

   Date: Fri, 14 Jun 2002 19:55:22 +0200
   From: Tim Jansen <tim@tjansen.de>

   On Friday 14 June 2002 16:34, Ilya Konstantinov wrote:
   >   2. Providing a way to run graphical (X) applications on HotPlug
   > triggers. xhotplugd would not provide a GUI, but only means for
   > applications to "register" a file to be executed upon a HotPlug event.

   Functionality like this is certainly needed and I would be
   insterested in helping to realize it. But you could probably also
   extend the the current hotplug script to communicate with GUI apps.
   What you would need is a script/program that can send events to the
   GUI apps, for example by sending information about the event to a
   named pipe. A daemon of the desktop environment could then listen
   to that pipe. The advantage of this solution is that a) you can
   base such an app on the current hotplug system and b) you do not
   depend on X11, it would also work for console/DirectFB/etc...

I agree with this, although I think it doesn't go far enough.  I think
there's a need for a general event-signalling mechanism.  This can be
used in a number of contexts: hotplug events, apm/acpi events, network
configuration, pcmcia.  The advantage of doing it this way is that it
provides a uniform signalling interface, therefore making it easier to
modularize the signalling and handling code.  This is as opposed to
the current system, in which all of the event-signalling mechanisms
have their own idiosyncratic interfaces, which nearly always are
conventions for invoking shell scripts.  This problem is particularly
obvious in the context of laptop network configuration, in which there
are many different packages, each of which is composed of several
parts built into a monolithic program; if all of these programs used a
standard event mechanism, they could be modularized and the end user
to use each module separately, even mixing modules from different
packages.

I've designed and started implementing this mechanism, and plan to
deploy it both for APM and for network configuration in Debian.  The
design is very general, and is based on sockets so that it can easily
be extended to handle inter-machine signalling if that ever turns out
to be useful.  The protocol will be implemented on top of BEEP, so
that it is easy to maintain and to secure.

I'd be interested in discussing this further if anyone is interested.
Although perhaps it's not really on-topic for this mailing list.

Chris

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