libevent Integration Into NetBSD

Dan writes "Niels Provos says this is a heads up for the upcoming integration of libevent into the NetBSD source tree. Libevent provides a simple API to abstract event notification and handling. Applications are notified via callbacks on IO events, timers and signals. Libevent is meant to replace the event loop found in event driven software."

Looks good but

[ObviousGuy]

OpenBSD needs to catch up a bit. This is release 0.7 but OpenBSD is still using 0.5.

Hopefully the new version will be approved and performance gains realized.

Re:Looks good but

[Anonymous Coward]

Niels Provos no longer has CVS commit privileges for OpenBSD, so that may be the reason why libevent is out of date in that tree. I don't know why he no longer has commit privileges, but he is doing increasing amounts of work on NetBSD these days.

Re:Looks good but

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a shame, since Provos has always done great work in OpenBSD. I've never heard exactly why they parted ways, they kept it pretty quiet. (The reflex will be to blame Theo of course..) If it hadn't been kept so quiet, I would have just assumed Provos wanted to work on OS stuff too experimental for OpenBSD's security-first stance. After all, he and Theo obviously worked well together for years...

At least most of the stuff quickly finds it's way back into OpenBSD eventually. (in fact, they usually take the time to port the stuff to Linux as well when possible ... BSD people tend to be pretty swell about that -- I think they are under appreciated!).

Sounds a lot like...

[leviramsey]

...the dynamically dispatched virtual functions that Borland used as the basis for their ObjectWindows C++ toolkit about a decade ago.

God how I wish OWL beat out MFC...

Great Application Name

[cant_get_a_good_nick]

One of the apps that use this is named VOMIT [xtdnet.nl] which seems to take a libpcap style dump of an Internet Telephone conversation and convert it to a wave. I'd love for some covernmetn spook to use this in a court of law. "Yeah, we got a phone tap, we're gonna use VOMIT".

Why?

[ivoras]

This is probably just a provision for Linux compatibility. All 'BSDs have kqueue/kevent mechanisms.