IMHO this also means that using files to share state information is probably only going to get us so far. It may be time to think of using a daemon to do what has been done with state files in DISTCC_DIR so far. Yeah, this would be harder to use, but for a few installations, it might be a worthwhile option.
I don't think it needs to be harder to use, but it will need some more coding and some design work.
A daemon that knew about the state of all processes would allow you to centrally monitor all compilations by all users on all machines, which might be quite nice in some ways. However, you don't necessarily want that information to all be public. How should it know who to publish the information to?
Sorry, I misread you in my haste. I didn't notice you actually wanted to make the info available across machines. Unix sockets are of course no good there.
... If I'm going to change the way the monitor works, I would rather support better cross-machine views.
As you say, it is just architecturally impossible on Windows. Aside from the problems of naming and access control it might be better to use an inet socket. Even then, naming might be solved by writing the server's address into the DISTCC_DIR.
On a network of a few machines I would like the monitor to globally view all the running jobs by all users on all machines. Other people might want to monitor that too. That probably implies either a broadcast/multicast setup, or a central daemon that retransmits the notifications.
Because of trust issues, I prefer to avoid broadcast techniques.
By the way, it occurs to me that a local daemon would also be of some use. e.g. it could hold long-lived ssh connections to the compute servers (to save on socket startup time), and it could cache knowledge of remote machine status. But I'm sure you'd think of that yourself if the need arose... - Dan
--
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