[further discussion here should be moved off of the fedora-devel list -- this is basically just noise to the poor fedora developers. So I've set reply-to to me.] On Wed, Jul 28, 2004 at 04:52:17PM +0100, Jonathan Andrews wrote: > 1) Everything more than "Hello world" needs to store some configuration, > so doesn't that make it a requirement of most applications hence a lot > of processes within the application. That's not necessarily true. > 2) By putting a simple quick and understandable system in the kernel its > more likely to be adopted. Heh. Go propose this on the linux-kernel mailing list and see how quickly it gets anywhere, let alone adopted. This is a totally user-space task, and would just add bloat to the kernel (and attendant additional security concerns). > 3) Present in the kernel = No dependency on external libs, making it > more likely to be adopted. Well, the point aside above, that's not necessarily true either. You could put it in libc. (But still shouldn't.) > 4) Kernel = common API - if people would only need another API if the > configuration need was more complex than the base line, and mostly it > is not. There's quite a lot more to the common Unix API than kernel syscalls already. > 5) Why not show some leadership instead of just cloning Unix/Posix - "As > little as possible" need not be that same as "Not enough to be complete" This isn't leadership -- it'd be a step backward. The kernel should stick to the minimal set of core functionality needed for a *kernel*. In fact, there's talk of moving things like the IDE drivers into user space. Putting a config file finding and parsing routine into the kernel would be, frankly, horrid. -- Matthew Miller mattdm@xxxxxxxxxx <http://www.mattdm.org/> Boston University Linux ------> <http://linux.bu.edu/>
