On Wed, Jul 28, 2004 at 05:28:11PM +0100, Jonathan Andrews wrote: > Minimal for who ?? Configuration state is just as much a need for > processes as RAM or files. Even the flash based set to box will get > turned on and off ! Minimal for "_needs_ to be in the kernel". This clearly doesn't need that level of privilege, and there would be no technical benefit, so it has no business being there. > Ok, I bow to one who knows more than me - so its a user space problem, I > still think a common (thats to all distributions) API for configuration > should exist, where do you think it should live - Is it not a core > requirement for applications ? If so it should be a common component of > all Linux ? Maybe it should be in libc ? It would make grep simpler to > write :-) It might be okay as part of libc. But honestly, I think that would make such a library _less_ widely used. Programs should be portable between flavors of *nix, and if the Linux version has this weird non-portable extension, it won't do much. Better to make it a separate, small library. And, there's several such libraries in existence already (look on Freshmeat). I think what you should do is pick the best one, and work to get that in the Linux Standard Base. -- Matthew Miller mattdm@xxxxxxxxxx <http://www.mattdm.org/> Boston University Linux ------> <http://linux.bu.edu/>
