Several improvements to the way values are displayed in the
PCP platform DynamicMeter implementation:
- handle the initial 'caption' setting as with regular meters,
this required a new meter callback because we no longer have
just a single meter caption for the DynamicMeter case
- if no label is provided for a metric in a configuration file
use the short form metric name as a fallback
- honour the suffix setting in the configuration file
- convert metric values to the canonical units for htop (kbyte
and seconds), and use Meter_humanUnit when it makes sense to
do so.
Also improves the handling of fatal string error messages in a
couple of places, thanks to BenBE for the review feedback.
This commit is based on exploratory work by Sohaib Mohamed.
The end goal is two-fold - to support addition of Meters we
build via configuration files for both the PCP platform and
for scripts ( https://github.com/htop-dev/htop/issues/526 )
Here, we focus on generic code and the PCP support. A new
class DynamicMeter is introduced - it uses the special case
'param' field handling that previously was used only by the
CPUMeter, such that every runtime-configured Meter is given
a unique identifier. Unlike with the CPUMeter this is used
internally only. When reading/writing to htoprc instead of
CPU(N) - where N is an integer param (CPU number) - we use
the string name for each meter. For example, if we have a
configuration for a DynamicMeter for some Redis metrics, we
might read and write "Dynamic(redis)". This identifier is
subsequently matched (back) up to the configuration file so
we're able to re-create arbitrary user configurations.
The PCP platform configuration file format is fairly simple.
We expand configs from several directories, including the
users homedir alongside htoprc (below htop/meters/) and also
/etc/pcp/htop/meters. The format will be described via a
new pcp-htop(5) man page, but its basically ini-style and
each Meter has one or more metric expressions associated, as
well as specifications for labels, color and so on via a dot
separated notation for individual metrics within the Meter.
A few initial sample configuration files are provided below
./pcp/meters that give the general idea. The PCP "derived"
metric specification - see pmRegisterDerived(3) - is used
as the syntax for specifying metrics in PCP DynamicMeters.
