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Daniel Carosone skrev:
> On Tue, Jun 26, 2007 at 11:04:47PM +0200, Johnny Billquist wrote:
>>  Jared D. McNeill skrev:
>>> Have you ever opened one of our plist files with a text editor before?
>>> Give me a break.
>>  Well, the suggested external storage format was XML, but it might be 
>>  something binary (as has been hinted), or some even more tricky format to 
>>  get right.
>>  And that is where I might be getting into problems if my system is borked 
>>  out enough that I can't even run a text editor.
>>  cat is my friend.
> 
> If your system is this horked, you boot from your altroot partition,
> or from alternate boot media (a rescue/install/live cd, usb widget,
> netboot, or whatever's appropriate).  You use an environment where you
> trust the integrity of the tools (even if the tool is cat) to not make
> the problem worse.

Yes, that's nice, in theory. In practice, it isn't always that easy.
My main playing with NetBSD is on systems that have never heard the term 
CD, USB or netboot. Guess where that leaves me?
Yup: having a possible second disk that is bootable and working. And 
sometimes accidents happens, and I need to repair things from where I'm 
standing.
Like a few weeks ago, when I installed a new kernel, then a new 
userland, after which, I realized that the new kernel was so broken that 
I really couldn't use it. So I booted the old one (which I always keep 
around). Unfortunately, that left me with a userland from 4.99, and a 
kernel of 3.99. Guess how much fun I had getting out of that trap...
A *lot* of things didn't work, and I couldn't back down userland again.
(I can give you more of that story privately, if you really want to hear 
what kind of problems I can get into...)

> Proplib plists do not seek to change this basic fact of system
> administration practice, and changing the file format is irrelevant
> and won't change it either.

Changing the format of configuration files have real implications on 
crash recovery for me.

> Designing a system that is fragile or robust in the face of corruption
> of various properties and their dependencies that are used early in
> boot is a separate task.  Proplib offers opportunities both ways here
> (well used, more on the robustness side), but I think we should not
> assume developers are trying to make netbsd more fragile.

Let's hope not. :-)

	Johnny

-- 
Johnny Billquist                  || "I'm on a bus
                                   ||  on a psychedelic trip
email: bqt@softjar.se             ||  Reading murder books
pdp is alive!                     ||  tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol

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