wishlist: hddtemp+netcat support should be runtime configuration, not compile-time

Submitted by Tianon Gravi

Assigned to Fabian Nowak @timystery

Description

I tried to find a duplicate of this, because it seems like it'd be a common ask, but even looking through closed issues I couldn't find one (so apologies if I somehow missed it! <3).

The closest I could find was the implied "I wish I had time to work on this" in https://bugzilla.xfce.org/show_bug.cgi?id=13460#c2 and the "it's an Ubuntu problem" in https://bugzilla.xfce.org/show_bug.cgi?id=11783 :)

For distributions like Debian where the user of the plugin is separate from the compiler of the plugin, it would be very handy if crucial features like whether to query hddtemp via netcat or via direct invocation were user-configurable (possibly even to the extent of allowing the user to specify the path to hddtemp, netcat, which drives, etc, but any sort of runtime configuration would be a strict improvement over the current situation where the packager has to make a difficult system configuration choice on behalf of all users).

As it stands, I've got hddtemp running as a daemon, but because the Debian packagers had to choose between having me make hddtemp setuid and having me run it as a localhost daemon, they chose the former even though I want the latter (likely because the former is easier for users to actually accomplish), and my only recourse is recompiling this plugin (which is kind of unfortunate and more work than I'm personally willing to invest in getting this working).

Thanks for your work on xfce4-sensors-plugin! It's definitely appreciated. :)