Date: Sun, 10 Jan 1999 10:07:25 -0800 From: Mike Smith <mike@smith.net.au> To: Brian Somers <brian@Awfulhak.org> Cc: committers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: sysctl descriptions Message-ID: <199901101807.KAA07319@dingo.cdrom.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Sun, 10 Jan 1999 12:11:01 GMT." <199901101211.MAA75053@keep.lan.Awfulhak.org>
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Let's just sit on this one quickly. > > 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 ? What's special about them is that they are the presentation form of kernel tunable values. They're fronted directly to the user. > It's already been mentioned that if this goes ahead, ioctls will get a > description in the kernel next, and who knows what afterwards.... The suggestion that ioctls would follow is histrionic; when there is a utility which allows the user to look up and and make arbitrary ioctl calls, there will be a justification for adding descriptions to them. > 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.... Bollocks. How many of the current kernel text output facilities do this? And how many years since the kernel started emitting text? > 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. What's wrong with writing manpages? - they're too bulky - sysctl(1) doesn't know about them - experience shows they're never updated in sync, regardless of "responsibility" - many items don't need that much verbiage just off the top of my head. Looks like this bus shelter isn't going anywhere. 8( -- \\ Sometimes you're ahead, \\ Mike Smith \\ sometimes you're behind. \\ mike@smith.net.au \\ The race is long, and in the \\ msmith@freebsd.org \\ end it's only with yourself. \\ msmith@cdrom.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe cvs-all" in the body of the message
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