sysctl description spillover and also setting the sysctl ?

[Jason Hellenthal]

On Wed, Nov 30, 2011 at 11:52:46AM -0500, John Baldwin wrote:
> On Friday, November 25, 2011 2:36:30 am Jason Hellenthal wrote:
> > 
> > Found a troubling result of the following and figured someone might want to 
> take a look.
> > 
> > Pay close attention to the output and behavior.
> > 
> > sysctl net.inet.udp.blackhole=0
> > sysctl net.inet.udp.blackhole
> > sysctl -d net.inet.udp.blackhole=1
> > sysctl net.inet.udp.blackhole
> > 
> > 
> > Is this expected ? should it not just display the description instead of 
> adjusting ? as well not display the description like it is adjusting the 
> description too ?
> 
> Hah, cute.  It should probably fail with an error if you do something like 
> that, yes.
> 

Yeah thats what I thought about it to but the more I thought about it, if it just displayed the values changing instead of the description when =N is supplied I think that would be acceptable to. 0 -> 1 in this case. Or possibly sys.oid: 0 -> 1 # <Description> since sysctl.conf(5) also takes comments like that.

Not really thats something at the top of the list for fixes though. Low fruit. Food for thought.