Re: FreeBSD 5.3 setup help

[David Ayers]

Chris Vetter wrote:

> The question would be what might be so important that it has to be
> looked up in /proc and whether there actually IS another way to
> retrieve the information in a more 'standard' way.

Specifically, please let us know what information are you missing on 
FreeBSD and what is the 'standard' way of retrieving it.  You said:
"... you CANNOT rely on something that is only available on ONE 
particular platform (aka Linux)".  This implies that there seem to 
features of the API that only work on GNU/Linux systems.  Which features 
do you mean?

> > But in this particular case I thought we already have quite a bit if 
> > machinery in place in config/procfs.m4 and config/procfs-exe-link.m4
> > with HAVE_KVM_ENV and HAVE_PROCFS code in NSProcessInfo in particular 
> > for FreeBSD.  So which dependency specifically are you referring too? 
> > Could you give us a pointer to the bug report, please?
>
>
> My point is that, eg on Solaris and BSD, /proc (if it does exist)
> contains process information -- nothing else. As compared to Linux,
> that also stores information about the CPU, cmdline, interrupts,
> devices and *gasp* even the OS version (as given by uname(1)).
>
> In other words, if you program on Linux and solely rely on /proc to
> get info about the CPU, your program WILL fail on Solaris or any
> other UNIX.
>
> Aside from the fact, that NO system will guarantee that the info
> stored in /proc will be textual, as it may also be in binary...
>
> Sorry for bitching, but to me, using /proc is evil_TM.
> Yes, it may be convenient.
> Yes, it may be the quicker way.
> But it's everything but portable.

You've made you point clear that you dislike the usage of procfs.  The 
question remains, do we have a /dependency/ that leads to certain 
features of the API not functioning on FreeBSD?

If there is no bug and you only want to offer an alternative to replace 
the working functionality with something simpler that as portable and 
easier to maintain then please post a patch to bug-gnustep@.

Cheers,
David