sysconf -- a sysctl(8)-like utility for managing /etc/rc.conf et. al.

[Doug Barton]

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Unfortunately $LIFE is preventing me from an in-depth review of this
script at this time, but I wanted to lodge a comment or two. Please
forgive me for the brevity.

1. I applaud any effort in the realm of making things easier for users.
2. I like the general concept of having a programmatic interface to the
"settings" that live in "rc.conf and friends".
3. I have read the thread, and so I have a pretty good idea of the
environment that the author is working in, and that the complexity of
this script is (at least in part) a result of that environment.
4. That said, I think that in its current form the script is:
	a) far too complex
	b) not even in the neighborhood of "FreeBSD rc.d style"
	c) misses some knowledge of FreeBSD resources (e.g., mktemp)
5. For those reasons I am not supportive of adding this to the base at
this time
6. I would not object to this being added to ports, however
7. I agree with the author's statement that in an ideal world the
internals of the script would be added to rc.subr so that they could be
available to the whole rc.d system.

In fact, one of the features that has been requested to add to the
service(8) script is the idea of taking "enable" and "disable" as
arguments. I'm supportive of that, but haven't found time to code it
yet, in part because (as has been illuminated in this thread) the
problem of determining how to conclusively toggle the setting is not as
cut and dry as it appears. The model that I had more or less settled on
for that is to be certain that /etc/rc.d/servicename is the last file
sourced for any given invocation of source_rc_confs() and focus on that,
but even that mechanism has complications that I don't have time to go
into right now.

So to summarize, the general idea is a good one and needed, and an area
that I'd like to see more work in. Perhaps it might be a good idea to
move the discussion about that to freebsd-rc@?


hth,

Doug

PS, have a look at, for example, 'service named rcvar'

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