Date: Thu, 31 May 2001 09:05:17 +0930 From: Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com> To: Sheldon Hearn <sheldonh@starjuice.net> Cc: Jesper Skriver <jesper@skriver.dk>, Dima Dorfman <dd@freebsd.org>, cvs-committers@freebsd.org, cvs-all@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Documenting sysctls (was: cvs commit: src/sbin/sysctl sysctl.8) Message-ID: <20010531090517.Y54034@wantadilla.lemis.com> In-Reply-To: <25323.991263026@axl.fw.uunet.co.za>; from sheldonh@starjuice.net on Thu, May 31, 2001 at 12:50:26AM %2B0200 References: <20010531003943.E78414@skriver.dk> <25323.991263026@axl.fw.uunet.co.za>
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On Thursday, 31 May 2001 at 0:50:26 +0200, Sheldon Hearn wrote: > > > On Thu, 31 May 2001 00:39:43 +0200, Jesper Skriver wrote: > >> If we can agree it's in sysctl(8) it should be, I'll start with >> the net.inet ones, apart from the net.inet.tcp ones which are in tcp(4) > > Last time this came up, there were two schools of thought: > > 1) Document all the sysctls in one place so they're easy to find. > > 2) Document each sysctl in the documentation for the device that it > controls. > > The second option is great for thorough documentation, because it means > that the description can rely on the surrounding text of the manual > page. The problem is that not all sysctl's belong to a specific device. > > I think a balance can be struck, where sysctls that belong to a device > are documented in the documentation for that device, while sysctls that > don't can be documented in sysctl(8) (or some other common place). I think the obvious thing to do is both. Yes, it's a little more work, but how am I going to find which sysctls are available? If they're scattered around the man pages, the only way is to do a 'sysctl -a'. Then you have a maze of twisty little sysctls, all different. How do you find what they do? But it's more work that way. If we really have to have it only in one place, I think it should be sysctl(8). Greg -- Finger grog@lemis.com for PGP public key See complete headers for address and phone numbers To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe cvs-all" in the body of the message
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