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

Gábor Lénárt
2001-11-04T16:06:10Z

On Sun, Nov 04, 2001 at 04:33:54PM +0100, Jakob ?stergaard wrote:
> For each file "f" in /proc, there will be a ".f" file which is a
> machine-readable version of "f", with the difference that it may contain extra
> information that one may not want to present to the user in "f".
>
> 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 character string,
> or a host-native numeric type. Thus, (key,value) pairs and lists thereof are
> possible, as well as tree structures etc.
>
> All data types are stored in the architecture-native format, and a simple
> library should be sufficient to parse any dot-proc file.

Hmmmm. If someone would be able to implement new architecture which can
provide 1:1 sysctl/procfs support, there would be need for user space
programs parse proc filesystem. Then, /proc would be only good to administrators
to echo to/cat entries. So compatibility with old design can remain, and
new programs would be able to use the much more versatile sysctl support.
OK, it's a hard guess only. ;-)

- Gabor