[moving from tech-kern to current-users]

On Thu, Apr 08, 2004 at 11:33:21AM -0400, John Hawkinson wrote:
>Andrew Brown <atatat@atatdot.net> wrote on Thu,  8 Apr 2004
>at 08:52:54 -0400 in <20040408085254.B22368@noc.untraceable.net>:
>
>> like i said in the commit message (which has been lost), if you don't
>> want them, you don't have to have them.  as for me, the 152 (out of
>> the 425 nodes in my tree) that are done cost me about 5k, but i like
>> knowing what all that stuff is, without having to wade through who
>> knows which man page?
>
>Simply adding knobs is not sufficient. We're in a world where defaults
>matter, and good design matters. You should strive for a solution
>that works for everyone.

yes.  and making it easier to add new knobs and levers (and dials and
switches and readouts, etc) is a good thing.

>It sounds to me like you should adjust the sysctl mechanism
>such that it generates documentation files automatically. This
>doesn't seem too difficult. Instead of putting the text in the kernel,
>put it in a man page, or put it in a file somewhere else.

putting anywhere that's not local to the code itself makes the
maintenance problem about an order of magnitude harder as is evidenced
by the fact that the documentation is not complete.  or, to put it the
other way around, putting the "documentation" next to the code makes
it easier.

that said, unless you want to write a program that will scan the
*entire kernel source tree* looking for notes like these and determine
which ones are relevant (ie, the machdep subtree has different stuff
on every port), having them actually live in the tree so that they can
be queried ad hoc also makes more sense.  rely on the linker and the
kernel to find them automagically -- don't make work where you don't
need to.

as an aside, i had another idea about this (in addition to this, not
instead of) that i'd be willing to throw out, but not in this thread.

>Can this discussion please be re-spun on some other mailing list?

how about tech-kern?

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