sysctl description spillover and also setting the sysctl ?

[John Baldwin]

On Wednesday, November 30, 2011 1:48:15 pm Jason Hellenthal wrote:
> 
> On Wed, Nov 30, 2011 at 11:52:46AM -0500, John Baldwin wrote:
> > On Friday, November 25, 2011 2:36:30 am Jason Hellenthal wrote:
> > > 
> > > Found a troubling result of the following and figured someone might want to 
> > take a look.
> > > 
> > > Pay close attention to the output and behavior.
> > > 
> > > sysctl net.inet.udp.blackhole=0
> > > sysctl net.inet.udp.blackhole
> > > sysctl -d net.inet.udp.blackhole=1
> > > sysctl net.inet.udp.blackhole
> > > 
> > > 
> > > Is this expected ? should it not just display the description instead of 
> > adjusting ? as well not display the description like it is adjusting the 
> > description too ?
> > 
> > Hah, cute.  It should probably fail with an error if you do something like 
> > that, yes.
> > 
> 
> Yeah thats what I thought about it to but the more I thought about it, if
> it just displayed the values changing instead of the description when =N
> is supplied I think that would be acceptable to. 0 -> 1 in this case. Or
> possibly sys.oid: 0 -> 1 # <Description> since sysctl.conf(5) also takes
> comments like that.
> 
> Not really thats something at the top of the list for fixes though. Low
> fruit. Food for thought.

I think it's simplest to just make -d force descriptions only and ignore
settings.  I've committed a one-line fix to sysctl(8) for that. 

-- 
John Baldwin