On Jul 31, sirbruce@ix.netcom.com wrote:
On 07/30/99 21:27:32 you wrote:
Netapp - why do you do these things to me?!?!?!?!?
Graham
Graham - why would you rely on undocumented and unsupported commands and risk disappointing your management?!?!?
Bruce
I have to say, I think this is more NetApp's fault than Graham's.
I mean, yes, it would be safer to use only documented commands, but -- as people have observed here before -- NetApp has so many undocumented commands, some of which are really useful, that many people know about rc_toggle_basic and use at least a little of the stuff in there.
Some of you may remember the note I wrote about secret commands and how this is an area where we got confused about "appliance philosophy".
Brian Ehrmantraut (our Chief Simpleton) is running an internal project to fix all of this. His goal is to figure out which rc_toggle_basic commands people actually use, and document them.
We may also design new UIs for some of the commands, since many were designed for internal engineering test use, rather than for customer use. However, we are concerned about backward compatibility, so in some cases we may end up with a new prefered command as well as an old, deprecated command. One obvious concern on redesigning command UIs is breaking scripts, so we are especially interested in knowing which rc_toggle_basic commands people have built into scripts.
As you can see, we have created a bit of a mess for ourselves. Slowly but surely we are going to dig our way out.
Dave