Re: [Synaptic-devel] Automatic Proxy setting

[Michael Vogt]

On Fri, Jul 23, 2004 at 01:53:40PM +0300, Panu Matilainen wrote:
> On Fri, 23 Jul 2004, Michael Vogt wrote:
> > On Mon, Jul 19, 2004 at 11:30:38AM +0200, Jaap Haitsma wrote:
> > [..]
> > Yes, good idea! Unfortunally it's still a bit tricky. gksu let's you
> > start a new process as a different user, but you can't switch the user
> > of the running process. So what we have to do is the following:
> > 
> > 1. Start synaptic as user, do not lock anything
> > 2. When the user selects "apply", run gksu with 
> >    "synaptic  --non-interactive --hide-main-window --set-selections"
> > 3. This will start a new synaptic as root in non-interactive mode.
> >    It will wait for all selections (those need to be feed by the parent
> >    non-root synaptic) and then download and execute the changes. 
> > 4. After root synaptic finished, signal non-root synaptic to reread
> >    it's cache. 
> 
> Eek. That's going to blow the already largish memory requirements 
> sky-high. 

I don't think it will blow it "sky-high" :) Linux has copy on write
for memory pages, so most pages should be shared between both synaptic
versions. But we'll only know for sure once we tried it :)

Is the memory usage really that high? Synaptic uses ~25-27MB at my
system. I think that apt-rpm had a memory leak some time ago that made
the memory usage explode (~100MB easily). But it was fixed a while
ago. 
 
[..]
> I suppose it's ok to have this new mode but PLEASE don't make it
> mandatory. I'm certainly not willing to sacrifice dozens of megabytes
> memory just for the convenience of getting proxy settings from users
> setup.

No, this will not be the default. There will be dections for it at
startup. And it's not just proxy settings :)

Having a user mode will also make the GUI consistent (think of
themes), allow querry of the proxy and let normal users browse the
package database. And (most importend!) it's nice to have(tm).

Cheers,
 Michael

-- 
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