Hi John,
This seems like it would be a neat function to add to the Leitzentrale GUI - maybe a "Create Launcher" button inside the Component detail, beside "Restart" and "Remove". ("Edit Config" would probably be nice also.)
that's a good idea. I wonder, what do you think about the following aspects?
- When creating a launcher for a deployed component, should the start node of the component in managed/deploy automatically be changed to refer to the new launcher?
- What should happen when deploying a new component that has the same name as an existing launcher? If this is allowed - like today - the start node of the deployed component would differ from the existing launcher. Would Sculpt need to detect this situation, offering an "update launcher" button?
- Should the reverse operation be supported via a "remove launcher" button - removing a launcher for running component, turning this component into a regular start node of the deploy config?
Intuitively, I tend to answer those questions with yes to foster the consistency of the feature. On the downside, implementing those corner cases with their possible intermediate states is not quite easy.
What do you think?
I also like your idea to make the config of a component easily customizable without manually diving into the config/deploy or config/launcher files. Sculpt's underlying mechanisms actually support that today: When adding a customized <config> node inside a <start> node in config/deploy, the component observes a config update.
For example, if you have the pkg/sticks_blue_backdrop deployed (and copied /config/managed/deploy to /config/deploy), you can add the following snippet to the start node in /config/deploy:
<config> <libc/> <vfs> <rom name="genode_logo.png"/> </vfs> <fill color="#223344" /> <image png="genode_logo.png" anchor="bottom_right" alpha="150" xpos="-20" ypos="-20" /> </config>
You can even change all those attributes on the fly and the backdrop adjusts. This way, the backdrop can easily be customized without touching any depot content. The machinery it there. But I admit that the process is not really intuitive. ;-)
A button that takes the <config> node from /config/managed/runtime to /config/managed/deploy and shows the config in a text editor for live editing - that would be quite inviting!
Cheers
Norman