aliasing (or renaming) kern.geom.debugflags

[Benjamin Kaduk]

Dear all,

I feel like this has come up before, but a quick search didn't reveal 
anything terribly recent, at least.

The new installation chapter of the handbook for 9.0 (that Warren and Glen 
and Garrett and Gavin and more people I am probably missing have sunk huge 
amounts of time into) has instructions on (e.g.) preparing a USB stick 
install image:
http://www.glenbarber.us/FreeBSD9/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/install-pre.html
(scroll down most of the way).  But in order to do so, the instructions 
include 'sysctl kern.geom.debugflags=16'!  Now, an ordinary user who is 
doing this for the first time might ask, "why do I need to do something 
with 'debugflags' in order to make a USB stick?  I'm not debugging 
anything, this is a standard operation!".

I can't really advocate for changing the geom logic at this point in the 
release cycle (though it's not really clear why rank 1 geom providers need 
to be so special), but I think it would be nice to have a user-visible 
interface to it that does not have "debug" in the name, since the actual 
flags are apparently here for the long haul.  I could certainly imagine 
aliasing the debugflags to just "flags", which seems more 
innocuous-sounding.

Does this sound crazy?

-Ben Kaduk