Re: proposal for generic interface to /proc text files

Miquel van Smoorenburg (miquels@drinkel.cistron.nl)
30 Sep 1996 19:52:51 +0200

In article <Pine.LNX.3.91.960930182408.11970E-100000@audio.apana.org.au>,
Keith Owens <kaos@audio.apana.org.au> wrote:
>On Sun, 29 Sep 1996, Rob Riggs wrote:
>> On 29-Sep-96 Daniel Quinlan wrote:
>> >This is a proposal for a generic interface for text files in /proc.
>> >It is designed to be easy to parse with most languages as well as
>> >humans. It is also designed to be extensible, modular, etc.
>> [various formatting suggestions omitted]
>
>One problem that has reared its ugly head is reading newer format proc
>entries with older programs. The current plain text /proc files are not
[..]

Someone else has just proposed to rename /proc to /linux-proc or so because
/proc also exist on other systems (like SVR4) and eventually we would
perhaps like to clone that interface as well.

So assuming that everybody agrees reconstructing /proc is nessecary
(which is a bit unlikely) why don't you just build a totally new, seperate
interface? This way you can have both the old-style /proc and the new-style
/proc-linux, and when all programs (esp. procps and network utils) have
been changed to the new format you just build a kernel with only /proc-linux.

Mike.

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