python powered freebsd system

[Tim Middleton]

On Tuesday 27 January 2004 13:06, David Niergarth wrote:
> Athough not FreeBSD-specific, see Seth Nickell's Python-based System
> Services:

Interesting; though why is it i inevertantly shudder whenever I heard of a 
linux person 'reinventing' anything? This however reflects more poorly on me 
than the person doing the reinventing.

Scanning the slashdot link i found this little post to be the most succinct 
and thought provoking of all of the descriptions (including Seth's own):

    [...] His goal is partly to make a nice set of APIs callable from a
    desktop like Gnome to ease with management and error reporting.

As much as I love python, anyone who thinks the init system rewritten in 
python is going to gain wide acceptance is dreaming. The original poster 
though envisions more than an init system, but also a unified configuration 
system (of just the boot, or more general of apps -- maybe like gconf? -- I'm 
not sure. This also is probably dreaming. But it's a good dream. Microsoft 
did it long ago with the system registry... few unix people want to go down 
*that* road, nor is it likely even possible to given the more ecclectic 
nature of the broad spectrum of unix developers, but there is definitely a 
lot of merit in the idea behind it. 

The quote above to me sounds almost reasonable though. FreeBSD 5.2 does have a 
pretty good rc system going (borrowed from NetBSD, and worked on)... it's 
fairly unified. The rc.conf is a "sort of" configuration database. And the 
rc_subr provides a pretty decent rc-oriented API for the basic tasks required 
by programs that need to be started, stopped, and generally managed. 

Got me thinking that what might be more useful (and have more of a chance of 
general acceptance) is a tool which builds on top of this framework... a sort 
of rc script manager/configurer. Python would be a great and flexible 
platform for such a thing.

Just some thoughts... 

And now for some links of my own of varying relevance... for another take on 
service management, don't forget djb's daemontools... 
http://www.freshports.org/sysutils/daemontools/

And here's an sf group i stumbled on a while back that seems hasn't gone 
anywhere... who want to build a gui admin tool for freebsd. They want to use 
Java of all things. Well, at least with Java there is Jython! (Hmm, someone 
should do a port  for that!): https://sourceforge.net/projects/freebsdcc/

-- 
Tim Middleton | Cain Gang Ltd | I was allowed to play at philosophy no 
x at veX.net     | www.Vex.Net   | longer. --C.S.Lewis (SBJ)