If the data is available in binary form via a system call, you could also
have userspace programs that take that data and format it for humans. The
question is, where should formatting take place--in the kernel, or in
userspace?
Despite years of using Windows, I can sense my Unix roots crying
out "Userspace!!!" :-)
> deal with (on the input side, anyway), and other format changes should be
> rare because in most cases the format will be tied to the CPU
> architecture. Meanwhile humans get to read stuff that isn't cluttered
> with format version numbers or obfuscated to make mechanical parsing easier.)
I don't think most people would find a single line with a version number in
a /proc entry to be unduly cluttered, and things don't have to be obfuscated
to make mechanical parsing easy, as long as the parser knows the format.
--Tim Smith
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