New version of account-polld in overlay PPA

mardy · 2 Jun 2017, 20:12

Hi all!
Today I uploaded a new version of account-polld in the ubports overlay PPA, which as far as I understand will be used to create the image for the "devel" channel.
account-polld is a background process which is always running in your device, and which gets waken up every 5 minutes to check if you have new notifications from your online services. At the moment, it supports gmail, twitter, google-calendar, caldav and dekko (gmail accounts only). This new version doesn't change anything of that, but takes a few steps towards the plan to allow click packages to install their own account-polld plugins.

In this version, account-polld has been completely rewritten: it has moved from being a monolithic binary written in go to a slimmer Qt/C++ service which runs the plugins as separate processes, on demand. For simplicity, the existing plugins have been reused and are still written in go, but they could be written in any language (they could even be shell scripts!).

Even though this version doesn't offer noticeable changes for the end user, you might be happy to know that the memory footprint of account-polld has decreased, as reported by top. Before:

  PID USER      PR  NI    VIRT    RES    SHR S  %CPU %MEM     TIME+ COMMAND
 3391 phablet   20   0  919520  12764   8896 S   0,0  1,3   0:00.89 account-polld

and after:

  PID USER      PR  NI    VIRT    RES    SHR S  %CPU %MEM     TIME+ COMMAND
 2979 phablet   20   0   60368   6328   5448 S   0,0  0,6   0:00.20 account-polld

It's just a few megabytes (look at the RES column, and keep in mind these are kilobytes), but on embedded devices every byte counts.

Testing!

The new account-polld has been tested and approved while I was still working in Canonical, but things were moving slowly and we never managed to land it. So, it may be that it hides some dragons
I myself use only the gmail plugin, and I've verified that it's working. Notifications for dekko don't appear to be working, but OTOH I haven't seen them with the old account-polld either. If you are on the devel channel or have a writable filesystem (install account-polld and account-polld-plugins-go from the PPA) please give these new packages a try and report any regressions.

Last but not least, the code for these projects is here:

flohack · 3 Jun 2017, 08:05

Wow thats amazing! You are one of the first people contributing to the PPA A warm welcome!

BR Florian