Over the past while, there's been a definite pattern in Linux softwareof moving from a single monolithic configuration file (or a controlfile) to a configuration that is created by scanning a directoryand looking for eligible files. From a packaging system and systemmanagement perspective, there is a lot to recommend this approach;it makes it much easier for packages and sysadmins to add and removeelements to the configuration.

However there is a drawback to this approach as commonly implemented,which is handily illustrated by Ubuntu 1

My little issue the other day with DTrace makes a nice illustration of a variantof programmer laziness . As I sortof alluded to in the entry, although DTrace's function tracing limitationis documented, I didn't actually find it by reading the documentation.Instead I found it the hard and indirect way, by being a systemprogrammer.

When I ran into a kernel function that DTrace couldn't trace, I woundup:

• using the Solaris kernel debugger to verify that the function wasactually present in the