El Wed, Apr 02, 2008 at 09:19:12AM +0200, Ludovic Courtès ens deleit� amb les seg�ents paraules: > Hi, > > Lluis <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > >> I'm just an sneaker in many lists but... does Hurd support introspection? >> Or has any plan to support it? In that case there could be an introspection >> translator for supporting such fs constructs (all by free with a single >> translator... after paying the cost of implementing introspection, of >> course :)), but the base code would still be all RPC-based. > > `rpctrace' allows one to monitor RPCs made by a program; along with > description files that map message IDs to RPC names, it can provide a > textual representation of the RPCs, à la `strace'. > > Maybe what you propose could be done with a sort-of "rpctracefs" > translator? :-)
Well, I don't know how rpctrace internally works, but I suppose it's someting similar to ptrace, which gives information at "use-time", while such a filesystem would need some kind of introspection mechanism on the destination servers, in order to be able to figure out what methods are available, as well as their signature. A quick hack to that could be to store that information in a special section in the ELF (generated by the idl compiler), which simply lists the available RPCs and their signature. Then, setting the translator for a server would be like $ settrans /some/path introspectfs -p /some/server which retrieves the available methods for the server (from the binary's ELF or wherever the information is stored) and exposes them to the fs hierarchy. Read you, Lluis -- "And it's much the same thing with knowledge, for whenever you learn something new, the whole world becomes that much richer." -- The Princess of Pure Reason, as told by Norton Juster in The Phantom Tollbooth
