From owner-cvs-all Sun Jan 10 04:30:16 1999 Return-Path: Received: (from majordom@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) id EAA15733 for cvs-all-outgoing; Sun, 10 Jan 1999 04:30:16 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from owner-cvs-all@FreeBSD.ORG) Received: from awfulhak.org (awfulhak.force9.co.uk [195.166.136.63]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id EAA15672 for ; Sun, 10 Jan 1999 04:30:12 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from brian@Awfulhak.org) Received: from keep.lan.Awfulhak.org (brian@keep.lan.Awfulhak.org [172.16.0.8]) by awfulhak.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id MAA10854; Sun, 10 Jan 1999 12:29:06 GMT (envelope-from brian@Awfulhak.org) Received: from keep.lan.Awfulhak.org (brian@localhost [127.0.0.1]) by keep.lan.Awfulhak.org (8.9.1/8.9.1) with ESMTP id MAA75053; Sun, 10 Jan 1999 12:11:04 GMT (envelope-from brian@keep.lan.Awfulhak.org) Message-Id: <199901101211.MAA75053@keep.lan.Awfulhak.org> X-Mailer: exmh version 2.0.2 2/24/98 To: Poul-Henning Kamp cc: John Birrell , mike@smith.net.au, des@flood.ping.uio.no, darrenr@reed.wattle.id.au, committers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: sysctl descriptions In-reply-to: Your message of "Sun, 10 Jan 1999 09:22:31 +0100." <19447.915956551@critter.freebsd.dk> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Date: Sun, 10 Jan 1999 12:11:01 +0000 From: Brian Somers Sender: owner-cvs-all@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk > 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 Don't _EVER_ lose your sense of humour ! To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe cvs-all" in the body of the message