Binu Jose Philip's Weblog

Drawingarea full of lines

That title-ar aberration was me trying to rhyme with my previous blog entry title. But the title does say I did what I threatened to do last time. I wrote that python thingy to draw me the dependencies of an SMF service. The result is literally a rectangle full of lines as you can see with rpc/bind's dependencies.

I spend considerable time thinking with the belief that my way of representation was the bottleneck in not getting a simple enough display. Now I think different. In most cases, SMF dependencies are too complex to grok with a few pictures. It is not much use trying to hide that complexity under different kinds of facades. The trigger point for me trying to write this was the trouble my team, Suncluster, had in adding anything new to SMF. Now I think I have proved GUI-ically that it was complexity and not lack of application that caused all those problems. Now I can go back to PxFS and it's magic in making UFS a global file system.

If you got interested in what went into drawing those line, here is the code. You'l need python,pygtk and pexpect. The code is in these two files, svcgraf.py and svcgtk.py. The main program is svcgraf.py, which I ran as "svcgraf.py bind" to generate what I linked to above. Although the results are frustrating I am satisfied about proving to myself that python rocks; in this case because it allowed me to abuse it's ease of use by allowing me to not design but just implement :-)

Now, the time has come for me to watch the samba boys do their thing - 12.30 IST. Writing this kept me awake till now, that is the best thing any blog has done to me ... barring this..
More on why that later.

Posted at 12:42AM Jun 14, 2006 by binujp in python  |