On 2004-04-09 darkstar@city-net.com wrote:

>   How about this one: maxbigpipes: Maximum number of "Big" pipes.  I do
> have a question about that one, but the description doesn't help (although
> I admit it could without being much longer).

  Actually, there are a number of potential questions about that one that
are more complex, such as what happens when you run out of "big" pipes.
This might benefit from a long description, but it may also be that some
long descriptions are too complex to easily be put in a paragraph or would
need to be duplicated several times in slightly different ways or relate
different values.  One potential solution would be to require a
description of exactly one word, that being the name of the man page that
describes this value.  This could be done in the kernel with less memory
use and fewer consequences for not including it, although I still tend to
think it would be better to do in userland as I suggested (and would avoid
the issues of needing aliases).  You could have "sysctl man foo.whatever"
or such bring up the man page that describes foo.whatever.  Once you know
what it means, I think the name of the node is as likely to prompt you to
remember as a short description, and this would remind those adding a
sysctl to document it in a man page.

Matthew Orgass
darkstar@city-net.com