Re: PROPOSAL: dot-proc interface [was: /proc stuff]

Jakob Østergaard
2001-11-04T17:49:10Z

On Sun, Nov 04, 2001 at 05:45:45PM +0100, Tim Jansen wrote:
> On Sunday 04 November 2001 16:33, you wrote:
> > Maintaining the current /proc files is very simple, and it offers the
> > system administrator a lot of functionality that isn't reasonable to take
> > away now.
> > * They should stay in a form close to the current one *
>
> I doubt that it is worthwhile to keep them in the current form for any other
> reason than compatibility (with existing software and people's habits).

It's an essential feature for *many* sysadmins. It's just so *easy* to hack
up a script to act on the information in some file - or to take a look with
"cat" to see how you RAID resync is coming along.

> It doesn't make sense to describe things in 200 different formats, you won't
> help anybody with that. It also violates the good old principle of keeping
> policy out of the kernel. And, for me, layout is clearly policy.

User-readable, and machine-readable. I think that covers everything. And
that's two formats.

Where's the policy ? The only policy I see is the text-mode GUI in the
existing proc interface - and that is one place where I actually *like* the
policy as a user (sysadmin), but hate it as an application programmer.

>
> The reason for proc's popularity is clearly that you can use any tool, from
> cat over more/less to the text editor of choice, and read the files.

That's the reason why I want to keep the old proc files.

> There
> should be ways to achieve this without putting things into the kernel. Is
> there is a way to implement a filesystem in user-space? What you could do is
> to export the raw data using single-value-files, XML or whatever and then
> provide an emulation of the old /proc files and possibly new ones in user
> space. This could be as simple as writing a shell-script for each emulated
> file.

You're proposing a replacement of /proc ?

My proposal was at least intended to be very simple and non-intrusive.

--
................................................................
: jakob@unthought.net : And I see the elder races, :
:.........................: putrid forms of man :
: Jakob Østergaard : See him rise and claim the earth, :
: OZ9ABN : his downfall is at hand. :
:.........................:............{Konkhra}...............: