Bug 151330

You may be interested in setting the process name so that you see "zmd" in top rather than "mono" and so that you can "killall zmd".  See bug 147947.

Yes, please.

setting the process name will not be enough because then you would 
end up with

zmd zmd.exe ... 

you would need to rewrite argv[] too. Best would be to get rid of the .exe
filenames for shipped programs, they indeed look quite bad and I can't imagine that mono actually needs them.

Also to do this in the ZENworks branch and builds. James (snorp) check in with me.

mono is a "Windows technology", we should hide the fact zmd uses mono as well. Let's rename our mono package to "ycp8" so the community would accept it (and to get some really good PR).

Using Mono, a Novell product, creates bad PR?  I'm not going to change the file names just because of some ridiculous knee-jerk anti-Microsoft attitude.

The fact that 'killall' doesn't work is a separate issue that I'm willing to look into, and I've opened a separate bug for that: 155089

I understand that you don't want to rename the mono package - but that was not the initial subject of this bugreport.

The subject of this bugreport is renaming of "zmd.exe" - and this is something you should _really_ consider. Not (only) because *.exe sounds too much like windows, but because Linux binaries usually don't have an extension.

I don't care about anything looking like Windows.

zmd.exe is not a Linux binary, it is a .NET executable assembly, and those the exe extensions are the norm for those.  I don't see any good reason at all to change it.

So, if you don't care, why not simply rename the files?  Believe me when I say
that these process names will result in funny looking faces in the community.
Anyway, I tried.  This just proves my point.

If I run zmd, I run /usr/sbin/zmd, and therefore it makes sense to use that name.

James, please follow comment #4!

Andreas, I've already said that I would like that to be the case.  In comment #7, I said that I had opened a bug to that affect.

What I'm opposed to is renaming any files for silly "but it looks like Windows" reasons.

Closing, again.

For fixing the killall issue the easiest (and only 100% guaranteed to work)
approach is renaming the files.  A sendmail like process self-rename is possible but has it's own issues, for instance that the process name is not
reflected by an actual file anywhere, and that it's not as easy to implement
when argument need to be taken into account.  I'm wondering why you are so
violently against just renaming the executables, as surely mono loads
assemblies not named *.exe just fine (everything else would be a QoI bug).

Sure the convention for naming assemblies is *.exe, but that's not because
of .NET or C#, but because they were originally implemented on the Windows
platform and just followed their naming style.  Why UNIX platforms have
to follow the same convention, instead of using the established one (i.e.
without extension) is beyond me.  It's just a normal executable, nothing
special.  That it's an mono assembly shouldn't matter.  Like it doesn't
matter for shell, perl, python scripts, ELF executables, or you name it.
Noone of these has any special extension by convention, why should mono be
different?

You are right, that mono is a Novell product, and that we should not fear
bad PR from using it at all.  But the current products will be the first on
the market which use mono.  So why not set a nice standard on our own?

Michael, are you advocating that we rename all Java .jar and .class files as well?

The convention for mono apps is to name them foo.exe (or Foo.exe) and execute them through a shell script named foo.  We're not using the binfmt magic to magically execute mono on .exe files (nor do we want to, probably; different apps need different options).

If you use "exec -a newname" in your shell script, along with the prctl() trick mentioned in bug 147947, you will get pretty consistent process naming with ps, top, pidof, killall, etc.

I don't see a problem with the .exe myself; in fact a large part of the reason why zmd is in C# is so that it'll be cross-platform to Windows someday, and there will be only one master codebase for zenworks across all platforms.  The cross-platform nature of mono is a strength, not a weakness, and I get the feeling that .exe will become only more popular on Linux systems as time goes on.

FWIW, I've fixed the killall and ps/top issues (bug 155089).

Closing again.