Date: Sun, 10 Jan 1999 14:34:41 +1100 (EST) From: Darren Reed <darrenr@reed.wattle.id.au> To: des@flood.ping.uio.no (Dag-Erling Smorgrav) Cc: phk@critter.freebsd.dk, des@flood.ping.uio.no, committers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: sysctl descriptions Message-ID: <199901100334.OAA14807@avalon.reed.wattle.id.au> In-Reply-To: <xzpr9t49snd.fsf@flood.ping.uio.no> from "Dag-Erling Smorgrav" at Jan 9, 99 08:02:14 pm
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In some email I received from Dag-Erling Smorgrav, sie wrote:
>
> Poul-Henning Kamp <phk@critter.freebsd.dk> writes:
> > In message <86u2y0btan.fsf@niobe.ewox.org>, Dag-Erling Smorgrav writes:
> > >The attached patches implement a mechanism for retrieving a sysctl's
> > >description. I haven't tested the patches yet, but they compile
> > >cleanly against a fairly recent (couple of hours old) -current.
> > This was deliberately not done initially, sticking goops of ascii
> > in the kernel doesn't seem optimal.
> >
> > The intention was to have a program perambulate /sys and gather
> > the stuff into a man-page or share/misc/sysctl.desc file or similar
>
> <rant>
> OK, let's just ignore that somebody has spent time and effort to
> produce actual, working, value-adding code, since we already have
> vaporware which may or may not become real code some day, and may save
> us from a 0.04% increaseš of the size of the kernel at the expense of
> adding yet more complexity to an already burdened build system.
> </rant>
>
> If having sysctl descriptions in the kernel really is a problem for
> some people, it's trivial to add a kernel option to disable my code.
Whilst I don't want to piss on you for doing this, just a couple of
comments:
- the kernel itself doesn't keep many descriptions, because they're
meaningless. Take system errors as an example, to find out what
an error string is you call strerror(). Most of the strings inside
are messages sent out /dev/console or via log() or are there to inform
about bootup configuration. I don't know why one would need to have
sysctl descriptions "in-kernel". Maybe you could develop a libsysctl
and add include interface for reading in a config file with extras or
something similar.
- it's always a good idea to poll for comments on features you wish to
add to the kernel _before_ you start and make sure you get comments
from some of those at the center or the project. At least that way
you don't get to the situation of having spent months on some really
cool project only to have people knock you back.
Cheers,
Darren
p.s. it is a good idea, in general, just the implementation needs some
work.
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