From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-ID: <378f47e82d876408e51c03e6eb666d80@plan9.bell-labs.com> From: "Russ Cox" To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu Subject: Re: [9fans] changes in 9load In-Reply-To: <01e7742448008afaaec0acf79079d55a@plan9.escet.urjc.es> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Date: Wed, 21 May 2003 11:22:24 -0400 Topicbox-Message-UUID: b53c64a8-eacb-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 [The "I might. I will check tonight." was a response to a different, private email from Nemo. Sorry. Here's a real response to make up for it.] I'd rather not see the multiline environment variable hack go into plan9.ini. (Though if it did, I'd name the sections [$var] instead of [!var].) Plan9.ini used to be this really complex mess that you had to fiddle with quite a bit to get your system to boot. Now it's this really complex mess that you only have to fiddle with a small amount to get your system to boot. A plan9.ini for a typical configuration only needs to set mouseport, vgasize, and monitor. All three of these could be stored in the file system proper instead, making plan9.ini completely optional. I haven't done this because I'd rather see the variables go away entirely. If we autodetect the mouse and probe the video card for monitor and a good vgasize, that gets us most of the way there. If aux/vga can handle resizing the screen on the fly, we're all the way there. There will always be a plan9.ini. There has to be some way to tell the kernel things that it doesn't know how to learn for itself. But I want to see plan9.ini get more and more optional. Unless you're doing something complicated, you shouldn't have to know about it. One eventual goal for fossil is to replace kfs. This means everyone will be running fossil (with or without venti). Needing to put configuration info in plan9.ini suddenly makes plan9.ini a lot less optional. Thus I am fairly opposed to having it there. Instead, I would like to see the configuration information for venti and fossil put at the beginning of their disks, so that you can just tell it the disk and you're off and running. With some sensible conventions naming the disks we could boot an IDE system with no plan9.ini at all. Long ago, plan9.ini had syntax for defining multiline environment variables. It was dropped at one point because it wasn't found to be generally useful. I hope this continues to be the case. If we need to store that much in an environment variable, it means we've built the system in such a way that it requires too much configuration. Russ