GENERIC and DEFAULTS

[Matt Emmerton]

>on 30.10.2005 11:36 Uhr Cristiano Deana said the following:
>> Hi,
>>
>> I've seen that 'GENERIC' file has been modified, moving some lines to
>> 'DEFAULTS':
>>
>> device          isa
>>
>> device          mem             # Memory and kernel memory devices
>> device          io              # I/O device
>>
>> Why?
>> What does it mean? Should we include 'DEFAULTS' in our customized
'GENERIC'?
>> Or those lines are no more mandatory?
>>
>
>No, you don't need to include 'DEFAULTS', config(8) will take care of
>that for you.
>
>http://docs.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?200510271713.j9RHDNTo013082
>
>AFAICT, this was done in order to automatically include devices which
>are essential in most cases so less experienced users won't accidentally
>break their systems and later complain that e.g. X doesn't work anymore.
>
>HTH,
>
>Phil.

I know this has been discussed ad nauseum, but here's my $0.02:

Why not mark these entries as 'mandatory' in /usr/src/sys/conf/files*
instead?
This will cause config to error out if they are not specified in the config,
and handles the common case (normal users).
.
For those power users who really want to disable the devices, we should
smarten up the nodevice handling in config(8) to that (nodevice &&
mandatory) is not an error.

Regards,
--
Matt Emmerton