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

Jakob Østergaard
2001-11-04T17:42:18Z

On Sun, Nov 04, 2001 at 06:28:47PM +0100, Daniel Phillips wrote:
> On November 4, 2001 05:45 pm, Tim Jansen wrote:
> > > The dot-proc file is basically a binary encoding of Lisp (or XML), e.g. it
> > > is a list of elements, wherein an element can itself be a list (or a
> >
> > Why would anybody want a binary encoding?
>
> Because they have a computer?

Yes - good reason :)

The "fuzzy parsing" userland has to do today to get useful information
out of many proc files today is not nice at all. It eats CPU, it's
error-prone, and all in all it's just "wrong".

However - having a human-readable /proc that you can use directly with
cat, echo, your scripts, simple programs using read(), etc. is absolutely
a *very* cool feature that I don't want to let go. It is just too damn
practical.

But building a piece of software that needs to reliably read out status
information from a system providing something more and more resembling a GUI in
text-files is becoming unnecessarily time-consuming and error-prone.

>
> > It needs special parsers and will be almost impossible to access from shell
> > scripts.
>
> No, look, he's proposing to put the binary encoding in hidden .files. The
> good old /proc files will continue to appear and operate as they do now.
>

Exactly.

--
................................................................
: 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. :
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