Tuesday, October 20, 2009

java + picl = fail

Solaris has PICL - the Platform Information and Control Library - as a mechanism for storing and retrieving platform-specific information. It's structured as a tree, so a natural thought would be to load the information into java and use a swing JTree to present a graphical representation. (And would make a nice add-on to SolView.)

I wrote such a tool several years ago. It uses JNI to interface with the native libpicl, and it never worked properly. It still doesn't work properly - it crashes far more often than not. The crashes are consistent in the sense that if it crashes on a machine it will always crash in the same place (retrieving the same object from the picl tree), but are random in the sense that apparently nonsensical changes to the code will either kill or cure it.

Anyway, I'm just tossing it out there. It's called piclbrowser, and is available here. Anyone's free to take this and play with it, and is welcome to try and fix it.

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