freebsd stable - Dec 2005 - GENERIC and DEFAULTS

>on 30.10.2005 11:36 Uhr Cristiano Deana said the following:
>> Hi,
>>
>> I've seen that 'GENERIC' file has been modified, moving
some lines to
>> 'DEFAULTS':
>>
>> device          isa
>>
>> device          mem             # Memory and kernel memory devices
>> device          io              # I/O device
>>
>> Why?
>> What does it mean? Should we include 'DEFAULTS' in our
customized
'GENERIC'?
>> Or those lines are no more mandatory?
>>
>
>No, you don't need to include 'DEFAULTS', config(8) will take
care of
>that for you.
>
>http://docs.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?200510271713.j9RHDNTo013082
>
>AFAICT, this was done in order to automatically include devices which
>are essential in most cases so less experienced users won't accidentally
>break their systems and later complain that e.g. X doesn't work anymore.
>
>HTH,
>
>Phil.
I know this has been discussed ad nauseum, but here's my $0.02:

Why not mark these entries as 'mandatory' in /usr/src/sys/conf/files*
instead?
This will cause config to error out if they are not specified in the config,
and handles the common case (normal users).
.
For those power users who really want to disable the devices, we should
smarten up the nodevice handling in config(8) to that (nodevice &&
mandatory) is not an error.

Regards,
--
Matt Emmerton

On Thursday 15 December 2005 03:49 pm, Matt Emmerton
wrote:
> I know this has been discussed ad nauseum, but here's my $0.02:
>
> Why not mark these entries as 'mandatory' in
/usr/src/sys/conf/files*
> instead?
> This will cause config to error out if they are not specified in the
> config, and handles the common case (normal users).
> .
> For those power users who really want to disable the devices, we should
> smarten up the nodevice handling in config(8) to that (nodevice &&
> mandatory) is not an error.
What happens when you mark some of the files for a device mandatory but not 
others?  How do you make an option that isn't listed in sys/conf/files 
mandatory?  After considering these questions and several others, the 
conclusion was reached that it was a lot simpler and less error prone to use 
the same format for defaulting options on or devices on that we use to turn 
them on in the first place: i.e. a config file.  If it really gets peoples 
panties all up in wads we can move the defaults files to /sys/conf (e.g. 
sys/conf/DEFAULTS.i386 or even sys/conf/defaults.i386).

-- 
John Baldwin <jhb@FreeBSD.org>  <><  http://www.FreeBSD.org/~jhb/
"Power Users Use the Power to Serve"  =  http://www.FreeBSD.org