>For Andrew Brown, who wanted to know:
># isn't netstart supposed to be able to read ifconfig.### files anyway?
># doesn't it implicitly know how to parse the file?
>
>netstart only reads them in as much as they contain lines to be tossed
>directly to ifconfig; in fact, if we wanted to, we could just make the
>ifconfig.* files contain the full command string, including the
>"ifconfig"
>and have netstart just sh the files, but then it would be possible for
>ifconfig.le0 to really be an ifconfig for ie2 or whatever.

i see that now, yes.  :)

>As far as parsing goes, no, there is no parsing going on -- at
>least not at this point.  It's just snarfed and passed to ifconfig.
>The fact that there was a $af, $addr, $other_options kind of
>layout might have been due to some other program wanting
>such a structure, but the idea is that you can say
>
>for if in le0 le1 le2; do {
>	ifconfig $if `cat /etc/ifconfig.$if`
>} done

i think it was due to that-made-the-most-sense-at-the-time kind
of thinking.  which got us this far, so it wasn't all bad.  now
it's just different, that's all.

-- 
|-----< "CODE WARRIOR" >-----|
andrew@echonyc.com (TheMan)        * "ah!  i see you have the internet
codewarrior@daemon.org                               that goes *ping*!"
warfare@graffiti.com      * "information is power -- share the wealth."