Date: Tue, 17 Feb 2004 16:15:30 -0800 (PST) From: Nate Lawson <nate@root.org> To: Tim Kientzle <kientzle@acm.org>, wes@freebsd.org Cc: cvs-all@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: cvs commit: src/share/man/man4 acpi.4 Message-ID: <20040217160751.Q31680@root.org> In-Reply-To: <4032AB2D.60008@acm.org> References: <20040217203852.724BE16A567@hub.freebsd.org> <20040217125043.N30568@root.org><20040217143034.B31176@root.org> <20040217230348.GB31288@dragon.nuxi.com> <4032AB2D.60008@acm.org>
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On Tue, 17 Feb 2004, Tim Kientzle wrote: > David O'Brien wrote: > > On Tue, Feb 17, 2004 at 02:32:26PM -0800, Nate Lawson wrote: > >> > >>I meant the step in UPGRADING that says "cp GENERIC.hints > >>/boot/device.hints". If people follow that, you lose local changes to > >>hints. > > > > I think it is clear that one only does the 'cp' if they are upgrading > > from 4.x to 5.x. I'm not arguing that the knob isn't better living in > > loader.conf -- just that /boot/devince.hints isn't a [auto]generated > > file[*] and we can assume it is as "stable" as one's passwd file. > > > > -- David > > [*] I can't even boot w/o my custom device.hints due to the hardwiring I > > do for SCSI devices. This file cannot become volatile. > > Seems like it might be time to evaluate ways to separate > the "default hints" from the "custom hints". > /boot/defaults/device.hints, anyone? > Then the default hints can be auto-updated while allowing people > to preserve their local configurations. Personally, I've never > needed to customize device.hints and would rather it just get > auto-updated. This is not helpful since my whole point was not to create more places where user overrides go. loader.conf is blank by default, therefore it's an easy place to put overrides for both hints and tunables. Going and creating two separate files that are blank by default only increases confusion. If David chooses to put his custom values in device.hints, he can hand merge his changes in whenever he updates (for example, when a new driver is imported that needs hints and GENERIC.hints is updated). That's his choice. However, since loader.conf works well for overriding hints, there's no reason for us to recommend to users that they do it this way. That was my original point. Wes, please change the man page to point users at loader.conf, not device.hints. Thanks, -Nate
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