It's mainly to support per-ip certificates. Login processes are chrooted and unprivileged, so they can't go opening certificates or their private keys after init. So they need to get the full cert/key from the config process. So config parsing needs to be able to know that it needs to read the given file and put it in a setting instead of just passing the path.
Well, okay, I guess it would have been possible to mark some settings as "read this file" and the "<" wouldn't have been necessary. But the problem with ssl=no would be still the same and it would be less flexible. On Thu, 2010-07-22 at 13:36 -0400, Steven King wrote: > Hmm, very interesting. Is this to facilitate functionality such that > you may be able to specify the cert and key hashes in the config file > with a slightly different syntax? > > That is the only thing I could think of using a different syntax like > that. I've never seen this kind of syntax in other configs. > > On 7/22/10 7:33 AM, Timo Sirainen wrote: > > On 22.7.2010, at 6.21, Steven King wrote: > > > >> What does the "<" actually do? I just followed the wiki example, and it > >> doesn't clearly explain what it is for. > > Reads the setting's value from the given file. Similar to how < works in a > > shell. > > >
