svn commit: r300718 - in head/sys: kern sys

[Ian Lepore]

On Thu, 2016-05-26 at 14:37 -0700, Gleb Smirnoff wrote:
>   Hans,
> 
> On Thu, May 26, 2016 at 08:41:55AM +0000, Hans Petter Selasky wrote:
> H> Author: hselasky
> H> Date: Thu May 26 08:41:55 2016
> H> New Revision: 300718
> H> URL: https://svnweb.freebsd.org/changeset/base/300718
> H> 
> H> Log:
> H>   Add support for boolean sysctl's.
> H>   
> H>   Because the size of bool can be implementation defined, make a
> bool
> H>   sysctl handler which handle bools. Userspace sees the bools like
> H>   unsigned 8-bit integers. Values are filtered to either 1 or 0
> upon
> H>   read and write, similar to what a compiler would do.
> H>   
> H>   Requested by:	kmacy @
> H>   Sponsored by:	Mellanox Technologies
> 
> Would be nice if sysctl(8) would explicitly display them as "true" or
> "false"
> instead of 0 and 1. Now the userland can't differ them from uint8_t
> oids.

If it displayed them that way, then users would want to set them using
the true/false strings too.  If you start down that path you eventually
end up adding support for 0/1/true/false/yes/no/on/off, and if you
don't do that in exactly once place you end up with some oids accepting
all the values and others accepting only some of them, and the user
experience is confusing at best.

-- Ian