[illumos-Developer] dgroup.tab and friends

[Peter Tribble]

On Sat, Nov 13, 2010 at 6:39 AM, Garrett D'Amore <garrett at nexenta.com> wrote:
> I've recently been looking in some libraries (libadm, libpkg, etc.) and
> ran across a bunch of code for managing dgroup.tab.  I was curious.. I
> find some commands getdgrp, listdgrp, etc, which seem aimed at managing
> something called "device groups".
>
> Searching online, I found some references to this stuff in man pages,
> but I can't seem to find any actual examples of how this is used, or
> evidence that it is even useful.
>
> Does anyone here have background information?
>
> The supporting library code is particularly crufty, and I'd like to
> clean it up.  Perhaps we can just eliminate some of this stuff?  Or is
> it useful in ways that I don't understand?

I know I just killed the copy of all this stuff in libadm (there's a
duplicate copy of some of it under usr/src/cmd/devmgmt, and
my recollection from some of the comments was that is was
supposed to have been moved there). I suspect that if anything
actually does depend on this stuff, then it needs fixing, but I
wouldn't be surprised if the whole of devmgmt can go as well.

I have no idea what any of this was ever for, but it definitely seems
to me that all the device management stuff in the svr4 packaging
code ought to be taken out - I very much doubt if it actually works in
any event. When I killed this in my personal tree I took all the device
handling out in one go, both the pkg stuff (pkgmount, getvol,
ds_getnextvol, ds_getinfo, ds_putinfo, pkginstall -p, cachefs stuff,
device arguments in various places) and the dgrp thing. I imagine
OAMBASE could go as well.

As for the commands, I've never ever seen them used. I can't
imagine why they would ever be useful either...

-- 
-Peter Tribble
http://www.petertribble.co.uk/ - http://ptribble.blogspot.com/