From owner-freebsd-stable Tue Jan 29 18:20:56 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Received: from guru.mired.org (dsl-64-192-6-133.telocity.com [64.192.6.133]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 1C0CB37B417 for ; Tue, 29 Jan 2002 18:19:52 -0800 (PST) Received: (qmail 83021 invoked by uid 100); 30 Jan 2002 02:19:50 -0000 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: <15447.22597.666281.179771@guru.mired.org> Date: Tue, 29 Jan 2002 20:19:49 -0600 To: stable@freebsd.org Subject: *_enable="YES" behavior is bogus X-Mailer: VM 6.90 under 21.1 (patch 14) "Cuyahoga Valley" XEmacs Lucid X-face: "5Mnwy%?j>IIV\)A=):rjWL~NB2aH[}Yq8Z=u~vJ`"(,&SiLvbbz2W`;h9L,Yg`+vb1>RG% *h+%X^n0EZd>TM8_IB;a8F?(Fb"lw'IgCoyM.[Lg#r\ From: "Mike Meyer" X-Delivery-Agent: TMDA/0.44 (Python 2.2; freebsd-4.5-RC-i386) Sender: owner-freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG I was going to say non-intuitive, since everyone likes slinging that one around, but remembered what someone who knows more than a few things about interface design had to say about "intuitive" interfaces: When users say that an interface is intuitive, they mean that it operates just like some other software or method with which they are familiar.[*] So I'll switch to something less ambiguous, and call these things bogus. If you build a kernel without INET, the following switches don't result in any daemons being started if you set them to YES: syslog_enable sendmail_enable lpd_enable There are problably others, but I figured that was enough. These are all things that are clearly useful on a system without an internet connection. None of them start if you disable INET in the kernel. Neither the defaults/rc.conf file, the rc.conf man page, nor the man pages for those daemons mentiont that INET is required in the kernel to run them. Nor do the LINT or GENERIC files mention that turning off INET will cause various daemons useful on a machine without an internet connection to quit working. Oh yeah - I can't get to the machine even if I don't enable the firewall. If you believe that rc.conf should do the same thing no matter how the kernel is compiled, these things are clearly bugs. They make the behavior of firewall_enable="NO" with a firewall already enabled in the kernel seem relatively minor. If anyone is actually willing to look at fixing these things, I'll PR them. And probably start a witchhunt for other rc.conf variables that can be broken by careful selection of options in the config file. Personally, I think that not taking an action is not the same thing as taking the opposite of that action, and that people who change the options in the kernel should know what those options do, and if they can't find out from the documentation, they should ask. So simply expanding the documentation and comments will solve the problem. I'd rather commit a PR that does that than argue about what "not enabling" means. http://www.mired.org/home/mwm/ Independent WWW/Perforce/FreeBSD/Unix consultant, email for more information. * p 150. Raskin, Jef. The Humane Interface. Addison-Wesley, 2000. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message