The accidental <s>tourist</s> feature

[Eric S. Raymond]

This is amusing.  While auditing the recent changes to complete the
magic-address banishment, I discovered that the new refclock syntax
accidentally enabled a new feature.

It used to be that for the parse driver, the unit number was extracted
from the low two bits of the unit field (the last octet of the
address) leaving the high six bits for the subtype.  It had to be done
this way because there was nowhere else in the old syntax to pack both
the subtype and unit information - the actual type field (8) pointed to the
generic driver framework.

By implementing "refclock generic unit N" I accidentally removed that
constraint - the generic driver can have any number of units now.
That was weeks ago, but I only figured it out today.  The accidental
feature...
-- 
		<a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/">Eric S. Raymond</a>