>Due to OpenBSD's excellent "convention over configuration" (1), most people >don't need flags.
As a brand new OpenBSD user, I *love* how the flags work in rc.conf.local: "" says to me that the daemon is being called with no flags. "YES" doesn't tell me that; it just tells me that I might have to look in another config file somewhere. On Wed, Jan 28, 2015 at 5:33 PM, <openda...@hushmail.com> wrote: > Hello, > > On 28. januar 2015 at 11:02 PM, "Ingo Schwarze" <schwa...@usta.de> wrote: >> >>When you do need flags, it needs only one variable instead of two, >>which means less complexity. > > Due to OpenBSD's excellent "convention over configuration" (1), most people > don't need flags. > > Your argument that the current scheme leads to less complexity is nonsensical > at best. Less characters maybe, but are we really joining together two > different variables (startup and configuration) for the sake of saving space? > > Like Einstein said, "things should be as simple as possible, but not any > simpler". `daemon_flags` carries absolutely no indication of whether this > daemon is to be enabled or not. Like my teacher used to say, good design > should, where possible, make immediate sense to the user (2). In the case of > `rc.conf.local`, this is possible by splitting the current variable into > `daemon_enable=YES` and `daemon_flags=""` respectively. > > As for `pkg_scripts`, I'm also a fan of the way FreeBSD handles this by > letting you specify `<pkg>_enable="YES"` directly in order to keep things > consistent. > > Having said that, this is pretty much where my admiration of FreeBSD ends :-) > > Many thanks! > > O.D. > > (1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convention_over_configuration > (2) http://www.amazon.com/Dont-Make-Think-Revisited-Usability/dp/0321965515 > -- James R. Miller
