Dale Ghent writes: > On May 29, 2007, at 3:09 PM, James Carlson wrote: > > > John Plocher writes: > >> James Carlson wrote: > >>> ... and then what, exactly? Abandon all engineering sense > >> > >> This sounds like an overreaction. > > > > So where in any of our documentation do we make the contents of those > > messages any sort of stable interface? > > It's *syslog* we're talking about here. If one feels the need to > syslog something, they're unwittingly (or purposefully) committing > themselves to a /de facto/ Public interface. There's nothing the > kernel does with the text, and syslog isn't there to fill disk space. > Just like the words you write in this PSARC thread, stuff in syslog > is on the Public record, read by Joe Admin and scraped by Jane > Developer. Moral of the story: be careful what you say (read: log) > because it may come back to haunt you.
The whole point of having the ARC is essentially the opposite of what you're suggesting. Instead of "assuming" that someone meant to allow me to use something in my application merely because "it's out there," we require every project to declare _explicitly_ what things can be depended upon, and in what context they can be held to be reliable. Those explicit bits that are in fact "Public" must (in Solaris) have man pages. That's exactly the point. Nobody has promised to provide anything other than human (English only!) readable messages here. The contents of the messages are no kind of programming interface. They're not documented anywhere. They change arbitrarily all the time -- including in patches -- and they do so without any warning or even engineering review of any kind. Programs that depend on them are engaging in hackery. I admit that Sun has done a lousy job providing suitable interfaces here. That's clearly our fault. That still does not mean that debug messages are automatically nailed to the wall. > The best thing to do is to get a centralized logging framework > implemented under GLD (so logging across disparate drivers is at > least consistent) and live with what has been habit for so long in > terms of the log content. That's exactly what this case is attempting to accomplish. The first step is getting those logging messages into the framework where (if they exist at all) they belong. -- James Carlson, Solaris Networking <james.d.carlson at sun.com> Sun Microsystems / 1 Network Drive 71.232W Vox +1 781 442 2084 MS UBUR02-212 / Burlington MA 01803-2757 42.496N Fax +1 781 442 1677
