Messages in this thread |  | | | Date | Sat, 24 Oct 1998 07:21:44 -0500 (EST) | | From | "Mark H. Wood" <> | | Subject | Re: ARMS WAVING!!! Proposal to fix /proc dainbrammage. |
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On Fri, 23 Oct 1998, Tim Smith wrote: [good point about punctuation snipped] > Would it be reasonable to have some kind of format version number in each > entry in /proc? Perhaps the first line could be an integer that gets > bumped if the format of that entry is ever changed in a way that would > not be compatible with non-braindead existing programs? Might as well allow > for the possibility that the current reorganization of /proc (if it goes > anywhere...) might not be the last and make it easier on programs that > want to part things there.
Oh, no! Here it comes again. Perhaps much more important than endianness or punctuation is once and for all settling the question of whether /proc is for humans or for programs. Because these two types of entities have different, often diametrically-opposed, formatting requirements.
(My take on this question is that programs should not be looking in /proc at all; everything shown there should be available in binary form via syscall, and if you want to use the data in scripts there should be userspace programs that use the syscalls and provide script-appropriate formatting. This way, programs have no column-order or spelling issues to deal with (on the input side, anyway), and other format changes should be rare because in most cases the format will be tied to the CPU architecture. Meanwhile humans get to read stuff that isn't cluttered with format version numbers or obfuscated to make mechanical parsing easier.)
-- Mark H. Wood, Lead System Programmer mwood@IUPUI.Edu Some things are not improved when made "graphical". Imagine how crude Kilmer's "Trees" would be if reduced to comic-book form.
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