Date: Thu, 11 Apr 2002 11:42:03 +0930 From: Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog@FreeBSD.org> To: "M. Warner Losh" <imp@village.org> Cc: asmodai@wxs.nl, phk@critter.freebsd.dk, jhb@FreeBSD.org, cvs-committers@FreeBSD.org, cvs-all@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: Feature removal without replacement Message-ID: <20020411114203.H54120@wantadilla.lemis.com> In-Reply-To: <20020410.194114.77337477.imp@village.org> References: <20020410145747.C22430@wantadilla.lemis.com> <20020410054248.GY40979@daemon.ninth-circle.org> <20020411102253.C8400@wantadilla.lemis.com> <20020410.194114.77337477.imp@village.org>
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On Wednesday, 10 April 2002 at 19:41:14 -0600, Warner Losh wrote:
> In message: <20020411102253.C8400@wantadilla.lemis.com>
> "Greg 'groggy' Lehey" <grog@FreeBSD.org> writes:
>> On Wednesday, 10 April 2002 at 7:42:48 +0200, Jeroen Ruigrok/asmodai wrote:
>>> -On [20020410 07:30], Greg 'groggy' Lehey (grog@FreeBSD.org) wrote:
>>>> We're still telling people in the documentation that Userconfig is
>>>> functional, and I believe it still is in -STABLE.
>>>
>>> Doc does not document CURRENT. Unless policy changed while I was gone. :)
>>> [Or if I never paid really close attention in the first place. :) ]
>>
>> I wasn't specifically talking about the doc project. It's not at all
>> clear from the commit log that this implied removing userconfig (in
>> fact, it seems that that wasn't peter's intention at all), it's not in
>> UPDATING, and it's not in the release notes.
>
> It is now (I added the last line). Note that careful study of the
> mail in question, not all that hard to find, will show the
> implications.
>
> 20000612:
> Peter took an axe to config(8). Be sure that you read his mail
> on the topic before even thinking about updating. You will
> need to create a /boot/device.hints or add a hints directive
> to your config file to compile them in statically. The format
> of the config file has changed as well. Please see GENERIC or
> NEWCARD for examples of the new format.
>
> Indirectly, this also breaks USERCONFIG
This is not strong enough. Plenty of things got broken and then fixed
again in the last two years.
The whole issue here is much more important than whether we keep
UserConfig or not. The question is, who makes these decisions? I'm
pretty sure most people on this list don't use UserConfig, so they
don't care. But what about the implications on the ease of
installation? That's something that should be viewed from further
away. Otherwise we're going to end up with a system which can only be
used by hackers, and that was not our intention a while back.
Nowadays I'm beginning to wonder.
In this particular case, we have the alternatives:
1. We kill UserConfig and document it to the level we have already,
causing some confusion.
2. We kill UserConfig and document it well.
3. We find somebody to replace it.
Which decision we make depends on our objectives. Once upon a time we
were saying that FreeBSD was ideal for installation on older machines
which Microsoft had become too bloated for. It was also an objective
to be easy to install. Removing UserConfig breaks this.
That doesn't mean that it's wrong to remove it, but we should do it
consciously. In this case, it looks as if phk misunderstood peter's
intentions and axed it. Even if that's not the case, though, who
makes these decisions? I think it should be the core team for
anything which affects the view of the system from the outside.
Greg
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