From owner-cvs-all Wed Apr 10 19:12:13 2002 Delivered-To: cvs-all@freebsd.org Received: from wantadilla.lemis.com (wantadilla.lemis.com [192.109.197.80]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id D695437B400; Wed, 10 Apr 2002 19:12:05 -0700 (PDT) Received: by wantadilla.lemis.com (Postfix, from userid 1004) id 569E4816D1; Thu, 11 Apr 2002 11:42:03 +0930 (CST) Date: Thu, 11 Apr 2002 11:42:03 +0930 From: Greg 'groggy' Lehey To: "M. Warner Losh" Cc: asmodai@wxs.nl, phk@critter.freebsd.dk, jhb@FreeBSD.org, cvs-committers@FreeBSD.org, cvs-all@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: Feature removal without replacement Message-ID: <20020411114203.H54120@wantadilla.lemis.com> References: <20020410145747.C22430@wantadilla.lemis.com> <20020410054248.GY40979@daemon.ninth-circle.org> <20020411102253.C8400@wantadilla.lemis.com> <20020410.194114.77337477.imp@village.org> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <20020410.194114.77337477.imp@village.org> User-Agent: Mutt/1.3.23i Organization: The FreeBSD Project Phone: +61-8-8388-8286 Fax: +61-8-8388-8725 Mobile: +61-418-838-708 WWW-Home-Page: http://www.FreeBSD.org/ X-PGP-Fingerprint: 9A1B 8202 BCCE B846 F92F 09AC 22E6 F290 507A 4223 Sender: owner-cvs-all@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On Wednesday, 10 April 2002 at 19:41:14 -0600, Warner Losh wrote: > In message: <20020411102253.C8400@wantadilla.lemis.com> > "Greg 'groggy' Lehey" writes: >> On Wednesday, 10 April 2002 at 7:42:48 +0200, Jeroen Ruigrok/asmodai wrote: >>> -On [20020410 07:30], Greg 'groggy' Lehey (grog@FreeBSD.org) wrote: >>>> We're still telling people in the documentation that Userconfig is >>>> functional, and I believe it still is in -STABLE. >>> >>> Doc does not document CURRENT. Unless policy changed while I was gone. :) >>> [Or if I never paid really close attention in the first place. :) ] >> >> I wasn't specifically talking about the doc project. It's not at all >> clear from the commit log that this implied removing userconfig (in >> fact, it seems that that wasn't peter's intention at all), it's not in >> UPDATING, and it's not in the release notes. > > It is now (I added the last line). Note that careful study of the > mail in question, not all that hard to find, will show the > implications. > > 20000612: > Peter took an axe to config(8). Be sure that you read his mail > on the topic before even thinking about updating. You will > need to create a /boot/device.hints or add a hints directive > to your config file to compile them in statically. The format > of the config file has changed as well. Please see GENERIC or > NEWCARD for examples of the new format. > > Indirectly, this also breaks USERCONFIG This is not strong enough. Plenty of things got broken and then fixed again in the last two years. The whole issue here is much more important than whether we keep UserConfig or not. The question is, who makes these decisions? I'm pretty sure most people on this list don't use UserConfig, so they don't care. But what about the implications on the ease of installation? That's something that should be viewed from further away. Otherwise we're going to end up with a system which can only be used by hackers, and that was not our intention a while back. Nowadays I'm beginning to wonder. In this particular case, we have the alternatives: 1. We kill UserConfig and document it to the level we have already, causing some confusion. 2. We kill UserConfig and document it well. 3. We find somebody to replace it. Which decision we make depends on our objectives. Once upon a time we were saying that FreeBSD was ideal for installation on older machines which Microsoft had become too bloated for. It was also an objective to be easy to install. Removing UserConfig breaks this. That doesn't mean that it's wrong to remove it, but we should do it consciously. In this case, it looks as if phk misunderstood peter's intentions and axed it. Even if that's not the case, though, who makes these decisions? I think it should be the core team for anything which affects the view of the system from the outside. Greg -- See complete headers for address and phone numbers To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe cvs-all" in the body of the message