This project is intended to produce several GUI utilities for observing and controlling GNU/Linux internals. It's written in Python3 with Qt (via PySide2 bindings). It currently includes:
- niudu-devices, which visualises device hierarchy (as provided by kernel via /sys/devices) and device properties
- niudu-nix, which visualises Nix store and scope
Project is still in an early stage, it's full of bugs, incomplete functionality and the code can make your eyes bleed.
Unlike most software around, this project doesn't use autotools/Python setuptools/whatever as a (meta)build system. It uses Nix instead. Nix is package manager which is core of NixOS GNU/Linux distro but can be side-installed on (almost) any other distro, together with nixpkgs packages collection. For most software nixpkgs relies on build systems used by upstream projects, but Nix can be used as a self-sufficient build system, provided that dependencies all the way down to libc are handled by it. If you have it installed, you can:
- build NIUDU, via
nix-build, which will produce "result" symlink pointing to build directory in Nix store, so that applications can be launched from "result/bin/" - install it into user profile, via
nix-env -i -f default.nix - run it from project directory from shell, which can be entered via
nix-shell; buildPhase has to be run manually viaeval "${buildPhase:-buildPhase}"to produce missing files and symlinks in-place
Actual expression is "derivation.nix" which is, like most nixpkgs expressions, intended to be used via callPackage. "default.nix" is wrapper which allows it to be used out-of-tree. Note that unlike nixpkgs expressions which are guaranteed to produce working builds, out-of-tree expression can fail depending on which nixpkgs it's evaluated against, e. g. this expression produced non-working build against nixpkgs revision which had PySide<5.14 and Python3 aliased to Python3.7
You may notice that the project uses an unorthodox layout for files which get into the produced build, virtually being a simplified FHS layout of the build. This simplifies buildPhase and allows installPhase to be as simple as a single cp command.
NIUDU is for "Non Idiot User's Desktop Utilities" (referring to well-known L. Torvalds citate). It also sounds Chinese and coincidentally means "calf" in Mandarin (牛犊, Gnu calf probably).