Messages in this thread | | | From | David Chappell <> | Subject | Re: [PATCH] New documentation | Date | Wed, 2 Jun 1999 12:50:32 -0400 |
| |
On Wed, 02 Jun 1999, Riley Williams wrote:
> Can I submit the enclosed new documentation file for inclusion in > future kernel releases? It provides a list of the valid kernel > parameters sorted into dictionary order, and also classified as to the > subsystems that they belong to. > > One thing it does do is to point out the inconsistancies in the way > suchlike options are named. In particular:
> Note that I haven't attempted to change any of the options, as I have > no doubt that the current names are all in use somewhere.
On possible solution to this problem is to declare that kernel option names are case and punctuation insensitive. (Note that I am refering to the names, not their values.) The code which parses the options line could convert all of the left hand sides to lower case and delete dots, hyphens, and underscores.
Of course, all the code which reads option values would have to be changed to look for the `cleaned-up' names.
I don't know if this is a good idea, but I can think of a few arguments in its favour. One is that if the option is incorrectly capitalized or punctuated there is not error message generated. My suggestion would fix this problem, though it wouldn't help if the option name were misspelled. The second reason I can think of is that it is probably bad policy anyway to have two options which differ only in case or punctuation. Adopting my suggestion would make it impossible.
Any comments?
- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
| |