Date: Sun, 10 Jan 1999 17:42:51 +0100 From: Poul-Henning Kamp <phk@critter.freebsd.dk> To: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@zippy.cdrom.com> Cc: sthaug@nethelp.no, des@flood.ping.uio.no, darrenr@reed.wattle.id.au, committers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: sysctl descriptions Message-ID: <20680.915986571@critter.freebsd.dk> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Sun, 10 Jan 1999 00:41:34 PST." <50343.915957694@zippy.cdrom.com>
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In message <50343.915957694@zippy.cdrom.com>, "Jordan K. Hubbard" writes: >> On a fairly current system here there are 319 sysctls. If each of them >> had an 80 character description, it would increase kernel size by 25520 >> bytes. I'm very willing to pay that price, especially if I could decide >> at kernel compile time whether to include the descriptions or not. > >So am I. How does the rest of core feel, since phk seems to wish to >push it to a core vote? No, I don't want to push it to a -core vote, I merely used our CVS convention to indicate where DES could take this as the next step if he wanted to be (more) confrontational. For what it is worth, -core has already turned this idea down when I proposed it (twice I think), and I don't see any signs of changes. Compiling seldom used cryptic (if less then 80 char) messages into the kernel just isn't the right way to do it. Let me state that I think the field in the source is the right place to write the documentation, but that compiling it into the >loadable< kernel is not a good idea. Several reasoned emails have already pointed out some of the problems: I18n being just one of them. The only reason why I havn't yanked all the descriptions from the kernel long time ago, was that I had the following fallback plan: When ELF kernels were a reality, I would make the LINT kernel compile the descriptions into a separate section, extract it from the compiled kernel and stick it somewhere for sysctl to pick up. That way to update the docs you'd build the LINT kernel. Stuff not in LINT would have to provide their own files. (We now have ELF kernels (Nudge nudge, wink wink!). As for making a filesystem interface to sysctl, this could be done, but no real value was seen at the time and it wasn't done. What we really need is a registry without the mistakes M$ did in NT... -- 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! To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe cvs-all" in the body of the message
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