Chapman Flack wrote:
> Garrett D'Amore wrote:
>> For these reasons, I really, really don't think we should be making it
>> any easier to use kvm grovelers at all.  Anyone sophisticated enough to
>> be hacking on kvm grovelers *should* be able to figure out how to make
>> sysctl work.  If they aren't, then they *probably* shouldn't be hacking
>> on kvm grovelers because of point #2 above.
>
> I think you've made your reasoning clear, but the person it's not
> considering is a sysadmin user of NetBSD.  A sysadmin might even be
> the sort of a person who would love to contribute to NetBSD by coming
> back next month and doing complete rewrites of savecore, netstat, and
> systat, adding a bunch of new nodes to sysctl, all for the beauty of
> the thing.  He might not, however, want to do that the same week he is
> expected to get a system up and running.
>
> I understand that your opposition to providing a simple way for existing
> grovelers to be made to work is aimed at discouraging a specific
> population of people: the ones who might be tempted to write even more
> new grovelers.  But I think we should be careful not to discourage also
> another population of people: those who would like to install NetBSD
> and find a practical way of making it work.  If they hear us saying that
> a problem they experience because there are grovelers in the current
> system can best or only be resolved by their own effort to rewrite the
> grovelers, that adds a bit to their perceived cost of choosing NetBSD.
>
> -Chap

Do grovelers not operate at all today on typical systems?  I think they
typically *do* work, and this band-aid solution to a non-problem then
makes a class of users happy enough, that it is more likely that no one
will ever fix the real problem, which is that these programs shouldn't
be groveling in the first place.

-- 
Garrett D'Amore, Principal Software Engineer
Tadpole Computer / Computing Technologies Division,
General Dynamics C4 Systems
http://www.tadpolecomputer.com/
Phone: 951 325-2134  Fax: 951 325-2191