Date: Sun, 10 Jan 1999 12:11:01 +0000 From: Brian Somers <brian@Awfulhak.org> To: Poul-Henning Kamp <phk@critter.freebsd.dk> Cc: John Birrell <jb@cimlogic.com.au>, mike@smith.net.au, des@flood.ping.uio.no, darrenr@reed.wattle.id.au, committers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: sysctl descriptions Message-ID: <199901101211.MAA75053@keep.lan.Awfulhak.org> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Sun, 10 Jan 1999 09:22:31 %2B0100." <19447.915956551@critter.freebsd.dk>
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> There was less than 12 hours of warning, that is not enough for everybody
> to get breakfast and read their email.
FWIW, I back Pouls opinion. What's so special about sysctls that
makes them even need the description field in the first place - let
alone actually compiling it in ?
It's already been mentioned that if this goes ahead, ioctls will get a
description in the kernel next, and who knows what afterwards.... all
of this is a bad idea because the whole world doesn't speak English,
and this will be used as a precedent ! There'll be an array of
descriptions next and an access mechanism that checks your locale....
I've often thought about hooking entire man pages into binaries so
that you can ``myprog --man''. This is the same thing, and is wrong
for the same reasons.
What's wrong with writing separate man page(s) ? The argument that
these are disassociated from the code isn't good enough IMHO, we've
all got a responsibility to keep the documentation in line with the
code. Something like rc.conf(5) would probably be suitable.
> --
> Poul-Henning Kamp FreeBSD coreteam member
> phk@FreeBSD.ORG "Real hackers run -current on their laptop."
> FreeBSD -- It will take a long time before progress goes too far!
--
Brian <brian@Awfulhak.org> <brian@FreeBSD.org> <brian@OpenBSD.org>
<http://www.Awfulhak.org>;
Don't _EVER_ lose your sense of humour !
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