Re: PROPOSAL: dot-proc interface [was: /proc stuff]

[Jakob Østergaard]

On Sun, Nov 04, 2001 at 06:28:47PM +0100, Daniel Phillips wrote:
> On November 4, 2001 05:45 pm, Tim Jansen wrote:
> > > 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
> > 
> > Why would anybody want a binary encoding? 
> 
> Because they have a computer?

Yes - good reason  :)

The "fuzzy parsing" userland has to do today to get useful information
out of many proc files today is not nice at all.  It eats CPU, it's 
error-prone, and all in all it's just "wrong".

However - having a human-readable /proc that you can use directly with
cat, echo,  your scripts,  simple programs using read(), etc.   is absolutely
a *very* cool feature that I don't want to let go.  It is just too damn
practical.

But building a piece of software that needs to reliably read out status
information from a system providing something more and more resembling a GUI in
text-files is becoming unnecessarily time-consuming and error-prone.

> 
> > It needs special parsers and will be almost impossible to access from shell 
> > scripts. 
> 
> No, look, he's proposing to put the binary encoding in hidden .files.  The 
> good old /proc files will continue to appear and operate as they do now.
> 

Exactly.

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