On Mon, Jun 02, 2008 at 07:43:34PM -0700, Dan Van Derveer wrote:
> 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 strongly disagree.
Even in open source it's perfectly fine to have features that users just
are not supposed to use, generally because they're very dangerous or
impossible to support.
Ceri
--
That must be wonderful! I don't understand it at all.
-- Moliere
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