coding style - statistics

[Hal Murray]

Context is that James is working on making ntpq/sysstats (and friends) print out the totals for counters as a second column next to the since-reset that it currently prints.  The current counters get reset if/when they are logged hourly so ntpq can't see the big picture after the system has been up for a while.


Currently, we have a blizzard of things like:

extern uint64_t stat_received(void);
  and
uint64_t stat_received(void)
{
  return stat_count.sys_received;
}

I know that's the "right" way to do it, but it seems like a lot of unnecessary clutter to me.

It took me a while to figure out why I think that way.  A procedure would be the clean way to access a simple variable if that was a public API that we expected to support for many clients and a long time.  Doubly so if the data is in a struct.  But we don't have any external clients and we rebuild everything when we change the struct.

To me, the clutter isn't worth it.  Each slot is only used in a few places.  The clutter adds 2 more.

Does anybody have strong opinions?  (I can live with the clutter, it's just not the way I would do it.)

----------

I'm thinking of making a new header and module: ntp_stats.

The idea is to collect the structs that hold the counters, the code that does the logging and resets, and the new code that merges the about-to-be-reset counters into a second struct.

If people think the procedures are the way to go, I'll have to add one to bump each counter.


-- 
These are my opinions.  I hate spam.