GNU os suggestions -- system data interfaces

[David Elliott]

I've done extensive work in the areas of system administration interfaces
and automation, and in the area of porting Unix commands.

Two items that I find particularly annoying are getting kernel data
values and handling system files.

The nlist interface to the kernel is a major hassle for a number of
reasons.  First of all, I find that in a lot of development
environments, the kernel that is running is not /vmunix or /unix, but
is some other item.  Secondly, people often want to know things like
the load average without having to make their programs setuid (or
worse, they get root permission and start playing system god without
having enough experience).  Finally, sizes of data structures change,
yet there is no interface for getting these sizes, and in heavy
development environments, you can't even guarantee that your sys header
files match the kernel (or any kernel, for that matter).  Programs like
ps would be a lot more useable in the face of kernel programmers if
this data were available at run-time.

In the area of system files, or more generally system data, there is a
problem of consistency.  System file interfaces are sometimes designed
by people without any solid guidelines.  It's hard to know whether or
not # denotes a comment, or whether a backslash at the end of a line
continues a line or not.  This is confusing to people administering
systems, and leads to program failures more often than it should.

Also, I write lots of shell scripts, and I find it particularly
difficult at times to get to the system data, or to get it in a form
that is easy to digest.  It would really help to have some programs for
querying and manipulating things like password and ttytab entries in
"batch mode", allowing people to develop various convenient interfaces
to these files.

Of course, the main thing is to get these things out into the world
where people will use them.  It doesn't do a lot of good to
standardize if nobody adheres to the standards.

-- 
David Elliott		dce at Solbourne.COM
			...!{boulder,nbires,sun}!stan!dce