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Date: Tue, 15 Oct 2002 00:12:55 -0400 (EDT)
From: Nicolas Christin <nicolas@cs.virginia.edu>
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To: net@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject: Re: Rename of MSIZE kernel option..
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Note: I'm just a lurker here, but thought I'd give my 2 cents on this
discussion as well.

On Mon, 14 Oct 2002, Andrew Gallatin wrote:

>  > Would people be open to renaming the 'MSIZE' kernel option to something
>  > more specific such as 'MBUF_SIZE' or 'MBUFSIZE'?  Using 'MSIZE' can
>
> No.
>
> MSIZE is a traditional BSDism.  Everybody else still uses it.
> Even AIX and MacOS.  I really don't like the idea of changing this.

True, but John is right, it's too generic a name. The argument "it's
been forever so we can't change it" seems a bit fallacious to me:
that's with that line of thinking that one ends up with breakages no one
can figure out years down the road. You end up having to keep pieces of
code no one really knows what they're doing anymore, but if you take
them out, the whole thing crashes and burns. Not that I'm saying it
would be the case for something as obvious as MSIZE, but still...

> Renaming MSIZE to ISA_IVAR_MEMSIZE seems right to me.

I agree. Don't use something like MSIZE at all. The name is not explicit
enough.

For a transition period, one could define both an MSIZE and an MBUF_SIZE
equivalent to MSIZE for a couple of versions (say the whole 5.x series),
clearly stating MSIZE is deprecated and shouldn't be used anymore, and
then it could be completely removed in 6.x.

-- 
Nicolas Christin
Ph.D. Candidate, University of Virginia, Computer Science
http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~nicolas


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