I have also written a silly email to the debian maintainers to understand what is going on because the gtop.c is still shipped within source package gnome-python-desktop but it is not built. And the old gdesklets package ships its own file.
The gdesklets version will do for now. Here's how to grab it and use
# Get it
$ aptitude download gdesklets
Get : 1 http://ftp.fr.debian.org/debian/ sid/main gdesklets amd64 0.36.1-7 [2 699 kB]
2 699 kB downloaded en 1s (1 868 kB/s)
# Extract it
$ ar x gdesklets_0.36.1-7_amd64.deb
$ tar xJf data.tar.xz ./usr/lib/gdesklets/libdesklets/system/gtop.so
$ mv ./usr/lib/gdesklets/libdesklets/system/gtop.so .
# Check it
$ ldd -r gtop.so | grep libgtop
libgtop-2.0.so.7 => /usr/lib/libgtop-2.0.so.7 (0x00007feda0cb4000)
# If you don't have this
# apt-get install libgtop2-7
# Here's a simple example
Python 2.7.10 (default, Jun 1 2015, 16:21:46)
[GCC 4.9.2] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import gtop
>>> gtop.loadavg()
Struct { .last_pid = 9065, .loadavg1 = 0.14, .loadavg15 = 0.14, .loadavg5 = 0.1, .nr_running = 2, .nr_tasks = 398 }
There's also the new binding based on the Gnome-Instrospection framework but I'm afraid it's currently broken. It's autogenerated, and I have started to fix it. It's shipped with package gir1.2-gtop-2.0. Here's a sample code, it's very closed to the C usage.
#!/usr/bin/env python3
from gi.repository import GTop
GTop.glibtop_init()
buf = GTop.glibtop_loadavg()
GTop.glibtop_get_loadavg(buf)
print(dict((k, getattr(buf, k)) for k in dir(buf) if not k.startswith('__')))
And it runs (probably because of my local unsent patches):
$ python3 loadavg.py
server=0x7fe25d788c00 features=0 flags=0 server_flags=0
server=0x7fe25d788c00 features=20 flags=0 server_flags=b0000
{'flags': 15, 'last_pid': 9590, 'nr_tasks': 401, 'nr_running': 2, 'loadavg': [0.02, 0.04, 0.07]}
