WARNING: $XXX is not set properly - see rc.conf(5).

[Adrian Nida]

Hee-hee this one has an interesting story on my end.  I had this message
appear on my machine at work (the one that needed massive amounts of
addressable memory).  One night my wife came to pick me up and saw this
message and made some comment about how she was happy there wasn't any porn
on my computer.

I looked into it, and found that in /usr/local/etc/rc.subr there was a case
${OSTYPE} (I think that was the syntax) that was only set to handle FreeBSD,
and NetBSD.  Now, instead of blindly copying DragonFly over FreeBSD, I added
another case to handle our OS on my machine (btw, shell scripts do NOT
accept fall-through case statements :-@).  In addition to the case
duplication, I made the default statement produce a better error message
than the one that was already there, if there was one at all.  If I remember
right, there were about three places where I had to do this (the box dual
boots and I can't verify atm).  I remember wondering whether other files had
this problem.  I couldn't find this file in the CVS repository (but I
haven't figured the layout yet), so I am not sure if this file is part of
our CVS or installed by some port.  Either way, it might be beneficial to
grep our sources for 'case ${OSTYPE}' and make similar adjustments.

The kicker was that once I "fixed" it, my wife then got mad because the
message wasn't showing and she thought I was had some cache of "nudie
items."  I tried to explain it the best I could, but she still doesn't 100%
believe me.

Bottom Line:  Make your error messages meaningful.  Throwing up 'XXX' every
time you have a fault isn't the most politically correct thing to do ;-).

Adrian

> -----Original Message-----
> From: users-errors at xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:users-
> errors at xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Michael Spellecacy
> Sent: Tuesday, October 26, 2004 11:04 AM
> To: users at xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: WARNING: $XXX is not set properly - see rc.conf(5).
> 
> While booting up continued getting errors similar to:
> /usr/local/etc/rc.d/apache2.sh: WARNING: $XXX is not set properly - see
> rc.conf(5).
> 
> Fix suggest by corecode to change all occurances of "FreeBSD" to
> "DragonFly" in /usr/local/etc/rc.subr seems to have cleared up the error.
> 
> --Mike