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Date:      Mon, 11 Jan 1999 09:43:25 +0100 (CET)
From:      Andrzej Bialecki <abial@nask.pl>
To:        Mike Smith <mike@smith.net.au>
Cc:        Darren Reed <darrenr@reed.wattle.id.au>, "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@zippy.cdrom.com>, phk@critter.freebsd.dk, des@flood.ping.uio.no, committers@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: sysctl descriptions 
Message-ID:  <Pine.BSF.4.02A.9901110926000.6084-100000@korin.warman.org.pl>
In-Reply-To: <199901110727.XAA87311@dingo.cdrom.com>

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On Sun, 10 Jan 1999, Mike Smith wrote:

> Believe me, many of us have.  The only way to tie the descriptions 
> directly to the variables they describe is to do just that.   Any other 
> solution involves several alternative mechanisms and opportunities for 
> incomplete or innacurate descriptions.

I have an idea which can work around this whole argument: don't 
add description bloat to the kernel, let's just RENAME all the sysctls to
more descriptive names, so that their names would fit in 80 chars or
less...

Just kidding... :-) But seriously, those of you who are against the DES's
implementation: notice that we already have a kind of description system
implemented by the OID names themselves. The kernel doesn't care for their
names, only for numeric OIDs. So, in fact, why don't you argue for
REMOVING OID names from the kernel as well?

If it counts for anything, I'm with DES in this discussion - I especially
like the idea of building either an ELF section containing descriptions,
or an archive with descriptions put into /usr/share/_KERNELNAME_/...,
built during process of building the kernel.

There are already precendents of having long descriptive strings in kernel
- how do you think, what for are such options like: PCI_QUIET,
SCSI_NO_SENSE_STRINGS, SCSI_NO_OP_STRINGS etc.... But, since they are
hidden behind a kernel option, nobody minds. If I can speak for PicoBSD
project - neither do we.

Andrzej Bialecki

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