On Wed 14 Nov 2007 at 08:09AM, Liane Praza wrote:
>
> Should ssh tell me every time I use it that maybe I wanted -X too?
> Really.. think about a system that does this -- emits warning messages
> with nearly every command you type that maybe you want different
> behaviour. It seems we'd all go insane for all the noise. And we'd be
> significantly less likely to notice *actual* errors because output was
> expected in the non-error case.
>
> If a command needs to emit a warning message on proper usage, that
> command probably shouldn't exist. (Explicitly requested verbose output
> is, of course, a different story.)
>
> (This assertion will probably cause some heated discussion. But,
> warning messages appearing during as-designed behaviour which happen
> *every invocation* would be a departure from current design patterns.
> It certainly isn't a course SMF should pursue on its own. I'm also sure
> that with the passionate disagreemnts will come counterexamples -- it's
> software, so there are always counterexamples. If you want to flame me
> (err, have a civil discussion :) ) about this design pattern, please
> start a new thread rather than hijacking this one which contains Mark's
> well-considered proposal.)
(Delurking), I agree 100%. "Adding a message telling you this might
not be the right thing" or "Adding another interactive question" is IMO
usually the wrong thing to do.
With that in mind, I went back and reread most of the start/stop thread over
again.
While I defer to the team, I do think that start/stop could ultimately cause
more confusion than it causes relief. Here is the conversation I expect to
have at some point:
Customer: "My critical service was working fine, but when the system
rebooted after being up for 6 months, my critical service
didn't start, and I had to get up at 4am. WTF!!!???
Me: "When you got the critical service working the first time,
Did you use svcadm enable?"
Customer: "Yes, I used svcadm. I had to start some things up manually
because they weren't working"
Me: "Did you use *enable*, or *start*?"
Customer: "Umm, I don't know. How do I tell which services my
junior SAs are *start*'ing vs *enable*'ing?
I hope the man page will make the differences very clear, and point users in
the direction of enable/disable as the preferred method. Please also consider
whether additional observability will be needed.
To be clear, I'm not strongly opposed; I just wanted to raise this concern
as input to the discussion.
-dp
--
Daniel Price - Solaris Kernel Engineering - dp at eng.sun.com - blogs.sun.com/dp
