Peter Seebach wrote: > In message <87hbmo5fzq....@meyering.net>, Jim Meyering writes: >>Thanks for volunteering. Yes, this would be useful. >>There are many implementations floating around. > > There are indeed a ton. > >>Can you assign copyright to the FSF? > > I think I can. There is some ambiguity about the IP agreement at $dayjob, > but we do in general contribute some stuff to the FSF, so I can probably > route it through the open source contribution mechanism. > > My thought is that the first step towards a setproctitle() implementation > is a pure stub. The function returns void anyway, and I'm not aware of any > usage where anyone but a human user scanning the 'ps' list cares whether it > worked. Then, specific implementations can be tweaked. > > For BSD libc, of course, no implementation is needed. > > For glibc, there is a beautiful bit of trickery available. The
On Linux-based systems, it looks like prctl (PR_SET_NAME, ... could be an option. > program invocation name really *is* argv[0], apparently. You can > thus scan consecutive strings from there, until you find something > that aligns with environ[0], and have a pretty good guess that > you've found the length of the arguments... If nothing's moved. > I'm not sure how to cleanly check whether anything has moved. (The > key to this all is that you are allowed to generate a pointer one > past the end of an array, and even though you can't dereference > it, you can compare it to other pointers for equality/inequality, > though not for less-than/greater-than. So if the address just past > the end of argv[argc-1] is the same address as environ[0], you can > iterate through a bit further checking for values that can be known > to be part of a contiguous block... > > The alternative is to have something like setproctitle_init(). My > guess is that the ideal case would be to use setproctitle_init() > if possible, but if someone calls setproctitle() without doing so, > make reasonable guesses. > > My original plan had been to release the ensuing code into the public domain > so that people could use it arbitrarily; in particular, I wanted to use it > with a hunk of code where I really don't want to create any license > interdependency issues... I'm sort of torn here, because on the one hand, > I would love to see this in gnulib so people will stop needing to reinvent > it so much, but that does imply losing the right to use the code in > conjunction with, say, any of the proprietary stuff we sometimes ship. > Which would be inconvenient. (More concretely, the program for which I > need this is LGPLv*2*.) Can you simply declare the copyright to be LGPLv2+? Many modules are already LGPLv2+ (see modules/*).
