Two points come to mind:
1.) If a manual (or man page) warning is needed, the software is broken!
2.) Sometimes the error message should tell you how to fix the problem
rather than what is wrong.
My $0.02 worth.
George
Ed Carp wrote:
>
> acahalan@cs.uml.edu (acahalan@cs.uml.edu) writes:
>
> > From: acahalan@cs.uml.edu
> > To: linux-kernel@vger.rutgers.edu
> > Cc: viro@math.psu.edu
> > Message-ID: <2swOlax70cevgQcM.hT5nAtuM3skeaxU47CvCnNO7oWxqJ5f>
> > Date: the sixth of June, in the year of our lord two thousand
> > X-Mailer: telnet
> >
> > Alexander Viro writes:
> > > On Wed, 7 Jun 2000, James Sutherland wrote:
> >
> > >>> A) suppose we have a bunch of filesystems union-mounted on
> > >>> /foo/bar. We do chdir("/foo/bar"), what should become busy? Variants:
> > >>> mountpoint, first element, last element, all of them.
> > >>
> > >> The key question, presumably, is which FSs can we unmount from the union
> > >> without /foo/bar breaking? If all the FSs can be unmounted safely, none
> > >> should be busy.
> >
> > This is right. Being "busy" is a traditional UNIX flaw.
>
> Whether or not it is a "flaw" is arguable. The point is, this is the way it
> works. Any sysadmin knows the way to umount mounted directories is to start
> at the lowest mount point and work your way up - anything else is inviting
> problems.
>
> df:
>
> host:/ blah blah /host/root
> host:/usr ... ... /host/root/usr
>
> The proper way to umount is "umount /host/root/usr;umount /host/root". I
> dislike trying to put hacks in VFS because people don't understand how it's
> supposed to work and automatically assumes that it's broken. What is broken
> is people's understanding, not the way it works.
> --
> Ed Carp, N7EKG erc@pobox.com 940/367-2744 cell phone
> http://www.pobox.com/~erc
>
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