GENERIC and DEFAULTS

[John Baldwin]

On Thursday 15 December 2005 03:49 pm, Matt Emmerton wrote:
> 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.

What happens when you mark some of the files for a device mandatory but not 
others?  How do you make an option that isn't listed in sys/conf/files 
mandatory?  After considering these questions and several others, the 
conclusion was reached that it was a lot simpler and less error prone to use 
the same format for defaulting options on or devices on that we use to turn 
them on in the first place: i.e. a config file.  If it really gets peoples 
panties all up in wads we can move the defaults files to /sys/conf (e.g. 
sys/conf/DEFAULTS.i386 or even sys/conf/defaults.i386).

-- 
John Baldwin <jhb at FreeBSD.org>  <><  http://www.FreeBSD.org/~jhb/
"Power Users Use the Power to Serve"  =  http://www.FreeBSD.org