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Date: Sun, 4 Nov 2001 17:05:44 +0100
From: =?iso-8859-2?B?R+Fib3IgTOlu4XJ0?= <lgb@lgb.hu>
To: Jakob ?stergaard <jakob@unthought.net>
Cc: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: PROPOSAL: dot-proc interface [was: /proc stuff]
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On Sun, Nov 04, 2001 at 04:33:54PM +0100, Jakob ?stergaard wrote:
> For each file "f" in /proc, there will be a ".f" file which is a
> machine-readable version of "f", with the difference that it may contain extra
> information that one may not want to present to the user in "f".
> 
> The dot-proc file is basically a binary encoding of Lisp (or XML), e.g. it is a
> list of elements, wherein an element can itself be a list (or a character string,
> or a host-native numeric type.  Thus, (key,value) pairs and lists thereof are
> possible, as well as tree structures etc.
> 
> All data types are stored in the architecture-native format, and a simple
> library should be sufficient to parse any dot-proc file.

Hmmmm. If someone would be able to implement new architecture which can
provide 1:1 sysctl/procfs support, there would be need for user space
programs parse proc filesystem. Then, /proc would be only good to administrators
to echo to/cat entries. So compatibility with old design can remain, and
new programs would be able to use the much more versatile sysctl support.
OK, it's a hard guess only. ;-)


- Gabor