Garrett D'Amore wrote:
> Do we really need this bogus symlink?
> Can the admin just symlink /netbsd if /netbsd is not the real name of
> the kernel.  Creating another hack like a magic symlink seems silly to me.
> I think this whole thing is a non-solution to a non-problem.

What you think has never been unclear in this thread, but what's
been striking is the degree to which you haven't even followed
the discussion as it unfolded.  To hold that the thread is about a
"non-problem" is to have somehow not grasped any of the actual
substantive problems explained in the last couple of days.

Sure, the admin can create a symlink pointing to the real kernel.
And recreate it every time a different kernel is booted. Is that
what you pay an admin for, or could it be automated somehow? My
proposal was one way, Steve Bellovin's rc script was another, which
he first proposed very early in this thread, and IIRC you objected to
both. He has gone further and actually drafted up a script, which
comes in at 30 lines of shell in one file. My proposal was likely
to need about 8 lines of C in one file, vfs_lookup.c, in the
existing magic-symlink switch near @osrelease, @kernel_ident, and
@domainname.  Your objection seemed to be that 8 to 30 lines of
C or shell would be too much to spend on improving the usability
of the OS while tackling the longer term project of implementing
new interfaces for the groveling programs, an amount of effort
which you seemed to think would be somehow comparable.

Pretty much everyone else participating in the discussion has
posed thoughtful questions or answers, gathered information or
supplied new proposals that clarified the issues and the space
of usable solutions. As it turns out, a closer look at savecore
has convinced me that Steve's proposal is superior to mine for
that purpose, and just as good for the other grovelers (as long
as they run /after/ the script). If that is offered as a
consensus I will support it, and the symlink proposal will be
dropped, as you seem to prefer. But it's worth seeing that the
consensus, if such it be, has been reached through the constructive
efforts of a number of people other than you to understand and
contribute to the discussion.

By calling other proposals "bogus," "silly," "garbage," "half-
solution to one-third of the problem," and so on, you've left
no doubt about /what/ you think, and that doesn't bother me as
long as it doesn't embarrass you. But wouldn't it show you in a
better light not to stop at just reiterating /what/ you think,
but to join in the reasoned exchanges over /why/, which usually
entails trying to follow the trains of thought other than one's own,
and in fact responding to them? It really helps the conversation
get somewhere.

Others in this thread have done that. At your off-the-cuff guess
at how many groveling programs there were, someone else actually
looked, and contributed that information to the discussion. At
your off-the-cuff estimate of how long it would take to rework
them all, several somebody elses actually put in the effort to
look in the code and think about what would be involved. Against
that backdrop, one person has been kind of sounding like a broken
record, and I'm sure that's not really what you want, right?

-Chap