Hello Peter,
thanks for your sharing your thoughts. Let me please comment on your remarks about configuration mechanisms for Genode...
On Tue, Dec 22, 2015 at 02:08:17PM -0800, Peter Lindener wrote:
- Norman wrote: " *Supplementing Genode with user-friendly means to
configure...**Right now, **I use Vim as configuration front end, which is cool...*" My thought: One can certainly get a lot of configuration usability out of a basic, potentially colored, 2D ASCII text document. Not to mention how much lighter and more portable the (potentially remote) terminal display can be. So while GUI tool kits are great for some things, I'd like it if little headless nodes running Genode (Snickerdoodle http://krtkl.com/) would be just as easy to re/configure. Thus I vote that Genode's next generation of [ASCII] configuration files are both very easy to read, in addition to edit with a (potentially augmented) terminal emulation program... i.e. lets not prematurely jump on the GUI bandwagon, before Genode achieves a similar ease of configuration using a significantly lighter level of display / keyboard interaction...
I suggest you have a look at our release documentation for Genode 15.11 [1]. There we explain how Genode components are configured individually and assembled to meet functional and security requirements of specific use-case scenario. Furthermore, the basis for our configuration is XML syntax since the beginning (see [2] and [3]). For thorough documentation of the concept of component configuration you may have a look into the Genode Foundations book Chapter 4.6.
From my point of view, this sheds some light on Norman's comment about
using Vim to configure Genode, which should be taken literally: Any aspect of the system can be configured by editing XML config files and additionally our reporting mechanism is using the XML syntax too. I admit that I'm not striving for mere ASCII support but envision to use UTF-8 in the future for XML attribute values and node content, but that's a small detail. The mentioned appealing GUI "agents" are nothing but alternative front ends, but on the other hand important to get less technical users on board.
[1] http://genode.org/documentation/release-notes/15.11#Uniform_run-time_configu... [2] http://genode.org/documentation/release-notes/12.05#System_reconfiguration_a... [3] http://genode.org/documentation/developer-resources/init
given the goal stated above, why not at the same time provide a verynice set of terminal interaction API's within the Genode framework, that one can count on as a lower level system resource, such that other light weight apps that run on Genode can also count that this terminal interaction API might be made available as shared resource.
If I'm not mistaking this comment entirely, I'd like to refer you to our neat APIs for XML handling, which are the Xml_node and the Xml_generator. We apply these tools throughout the Genode source if configurations and reports are processed. The most prominent component using them is Init, but also the windows manager components, our platform driver, device drivers, VirtualBox, and many more.
So, what's currently missing for your use case may be a terminal-based "agent" for dynamic configuration if Vim is unsuitable. I personally see no need to add ncurses-like tools tailored for configuration, but your opinion may differ.
Regards