Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1760105AbYCFEt2 (ORCPT ); Wed, 5 Mar 2008 23:49:28 -0500 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S1757212AbYCFEtS (ORCPT ); Wed, 5 Mar 2008 23:49:18 -0500 Received: from phunq.net ([64.81.85.152]:42298 "EHLO moonbase.phunq.net" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-FAIL) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1757148AbYCFEtR (ORCPT ); Wed, 5 Mar 2008 23:49:17 -0500 From: Daniel Phillips To: david@lang.hm Subject: Re: [RFC] An alternative interface to device mapper Date: Wed, 5 Mar 2008 20:49:16 -0800 User-Agent: KMail/1.9.5 Cc: linux-kernel References: In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Disposition: inline Message-Id: <200803052049.16283.phillips@phunq.net> Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 1576 Lines: 34 On Wednesday 05 March 2008 18:30, you wrote: > forgive the lack of threading, I missed this yesterday and just found this > via the LWN article. > > I like the general approach that you are taking of simplifying the > interface, however in your interest of making it easy to write C code for > you are making the new interface difficult to script for. is it really > that painful to to make everything file based so that it can be scripted > as well? > > frankly, most sysadmins do a lot of scripting and almost no C coding, so > while a nice C interface is useful for creating tools, a good scripting > interface is critical for good, flexible use by sysadmins. Hi David, Scripting is already taken care of by the ddsetup utility (a compatible rewrite of dmsetup) which is just a shell to the ddlink interface. You would not want to put the "value add" of dmsetup into kernel. All that parsing and massaging belongs in user space. If there are more scripting features you need, they should be added to dmsetup/ddsetup, not to the kernel. Scripting device mapper has never actually posed a problem. The real problem is, there is no nice way to write a C program to do fancy volume management, so we don't see the advanced features appearing on Linux at anything like the rate they have appeared on Solaris. Daniel -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/