Hello list,
To continue last month's interactive GUI thread, I have a proposal for the interplay between GUIs and the subsystem manager.
I too would like a new way of launching and managing subsystems, but I prefer not dedicate any on-screen area for persistent menus. I would also live without any buttons if I could. I did some prototyping and found that I gravitate towards short-lived terminal components for user interaction as opposed to long-lived components such as cli_monitor or launcher. Rather than rework what I had into something that can appear and disappear in its lifetime, I figured that XML editing via Report sessions can support ephemeral menus and would require no modification of existing components.
I have a simple proof of concept that opens a file for writing and responds to Report requests to add or remove XML nodes from the file's top-level element. This combined with fs_rom is enought to dynamically add and remove subsystems from init. Its too rough to publish now but it never need be a complictated implementation.
I mentioned this to Christian Helmuth off-list and he suggested that it would be a transactional editor, which makes perfect sense. The tree can contain inline edit annotations or the XML could be stored as different revision files with a symlink pointer to the current version. This would allow for configuration replay without a lot of overhead or specialized tooling.
Does this seem like a reasonable style of init mangagment that we can all get along with, I missing something?
cheers, Emery