
pptop: pretty pathetic top.

  pptop is largely based on the "ps" code of Miles Bader and is heavily
  dependent on libps - and therefore completely non-portable to other 
  operating systems (other than the Hurd-based system, I mean).

  Miles' post to the mailing list originally spurred me (PE) to make 
  a top clone.

  This program evolved out of a guile script to run ps. Ncurses was addded 
  to guile to provide terminal control.  However, I could never make
  (getch) work with guile and presumed that there was a problem in the 
  ncurses/guile interface.  So I gave up using guile.  

  It turns out that there was nothing wrong with guile, there was a problem
  with ncurses, or even lower level than that (I don't know yet). 
  


  There are several things still broken here.

  o The Mach factors and the load averages are always 0.0

  o There is a segmentation fault after several window resizes

  o There is a memory leak (I suspect that this is due to libps usage). 
  
  o James Morrison reports that it doesn't work and he suspects that his
    rewind (glibc) is broken.

  o The paging information seems wrong.

  o We need code similar to vmstat, but that is not included.

  o We want the number of idle and running processes: this is not included. 

  o getch() seems broken, so we cannot change things (or show the 
    help page) on keyboard input.

  o There are no command line arguments and there should be, e.g. 
    --show-threads, --interval, --process-filter-set. 
  
  o string_splitter should be fixed to dynamically allocate extra memory 
    for string pointers if necesary.


Contact
-------

	<hurdextras-hackers@nongnu.org>

