I was recently hacking on some of the scripts in /lib/svc/method to change the way my OpenSolaris install booted. In the process I found myself needing to understand what all these scripts were actually doing. This was going along well until I hit a line that had this: devfsadm -I
I ran off to the man page to see what this -I option does and surprisingly its not documented. At the time I decided to leave off the option which lead to much troubleshooting later on. All of that effort could have been avoided if these options were documented were all system administrators look for those answers. I filed a bug on this because obviously -I(and -P that i found later) are legitimate options that the devfsadm program understands. The bug is located here: http://bugs.opensolaris.org/view_bug.do?bug_id=6707975 In response to the bug I was told these options are "private" options by the engineer working on the bug. The source for this command is freely available here: http://src.opensolaris.org/source/xref/onnv/onnv-gate/usr/src/cmd/devfsadm/devfsadm.c In the switch block at line 738 I was able to get a good idea of what these options do based on the comments. Obviously, they are not *that* private if the source is easily obtained and understood. I bring this up here because if OpenSolaris is going to be an open source project all aspects of it need to behave like one and this is clearly an area that is exhibiting a closed source mind set still. I have attached an updated version of the man page for devfsadm to this post based on what the comments in devfsadm.c indicated. This message posted from opensolaris.org -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: devfsadm.1m Type: application/octet-stream Size: 6471 bytes Desc: not available URL: <http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/docs-discuss/attachments/20080602/cd496534/attachment.obj>
