RE: [MiNT] What's in, what's out?

["Julian Reschke" <reschke@medicaldataservice.de>]

> From: owner-mint@fishpool.com [mailto:owner-mint@fishpool.com]On Behalf
> Of Guido Flohr
> Sent: Monday, November 29, 1999 1:36 AM
> To: MiNT mailing list
> Subject: Re: [MiNT] What's in, what's out?
>
>
> Hi,
>
> On Mon, Nov 29, 1999 at 12:06:41AM +0100, Michael Schwingen wrote:
> > > > That's nice but only useful in shell scripts. I'd prefer to
> repair Ssystem()
> > > > instead.
> > >
> > > The /kern fs actually calls Ssystem to get the information.
> And it works.
> >
> > In that case, it might as well be implemented outside the kernel, eg. by
> > writing a single program that gets the filename in /kern as an
> argument and
> > prints the result to stdout.
>
> /kern/cookiejar was just one example.  That's twenty lines of code and its
> handy.

Well, maybe it's a very good example. Extend the existing interfaces so that
you can query all required information through Ssystem() or /proc, then make
/kern a loadable (and optional) XFS.

> > > Being human-readable does not necessarily imply
> not-machine-readable.  You
> > > can easily parse the information in your programs.
> >
> > That is a bad idea. Linux already had incompatibilities due to
> changes in
> > /proc more than once with the effect that some programs crashed on newer
> > kernels because they could not parse the modified files correctly.
>
> That has nothing to do with being human-readable.  Binary formats do also
> change.

Well, but it tells a story if your stated goal was to be Linux compatible
:-)

> > IMHO, there should be either human-readable output (and then
> programs should
> > be discouraged from parsing it), or there should be an easily-parseable,
> > maybe binary, interface for programs to use.
> >
> > And if we want human-readable output, I don't think it is good
> to put this
> > in the kernel.
>
> That human-readable output will only consume memory if somebody actually
> wants to see it. And performance is not really important for these files.

I takes up memory.

> ...