I tried making a similar project using Qt that would support a host of different init systems, but I unfortunately found that due to the available APIs and differing architectures of the different init systems, a consistent UI was really difficult. Systemd in particular didn't have a dbus API for logs.

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physicles 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Were you concerned about the overhead of shelling out to journalctl?

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Pay08 4 hours ago | parent [-]

No, at the very worst I could have done it on a different thread (although I don't expect to have needed to). Since I initially planned on supporting 3 different init systems (systemd, Shepherd, and OpenRC) which are all used on wildly different systems, the shelling approach seemed way too brittle. Paths for example are going to be significantly different for systemd on Ubuntu and NixOS for example, and then there are distros like Alpine that like to put binaries into /usr/lib instead of /usr/bin sometimes for some unknown reason (had that one happen to me with Ninja, which caused problems with some CMake scripts I was using). So ultimately, I decided that the project had too many unknowns. Bit of a shame, since I planned to use it to really get to grips with Haskell.

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marshray 3 hours ago | parent [-]

You abandoned your dreams of mastering Haskell by making a system operator UI using QT, but gave up out of concern that `journalctl` might not be in PATH?

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Pay08 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I gave up because I couldn't see a way to make the program consistent. The path issues were the most immediate concern, yes, but not the only one. I really wanted a consistent UI because there are few things that irritate me more than UI layouts switching up on me, but I just couldn't see a way of doing that. For example, OpenRC stores the complete description of service definitions in 2 separate files, one of which is optional. You have a shell script that contains the code to run in /etc/init.d, but you also have a config file that describes the environment that code is ran in in /etc/conf.d. If I wanted to have services be editable live in the GUI (and that was one of the main features I wanted out of it), I would have had to split the text editor into two panes for OpenRC.

Overall, I guess this is a kind of perfectionism or choice paralysis I guess. I have continued to write Haskell since, and am now comfortable with the base language, if not the ecosystem (I have no idea what a lens is).

	▲	marshray 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		[stares awkwardly in Haskell] I often have to remind myself that we have the programs we have today only because somebody wanted them to exist more than they wanted them to express abstract properties like consistency.