This work until you happen to come across a substituted string which happens to contain a colon.
Your proposal also is much more complicated, for no tangible gain AFAICS.
Posted Apr 15, 2012 0:40 UTC (Sun) by slashdot (guest, #22014)
[Link]
You don't parse the colons...
The kernel sees "%[subsys]s" and adds the argument as the value of the "subsys" key, using the same format (or alternatively, just prints the unformatted format string, and userspace does the work).
This would make the API easy to use, compared to the patch which requires horrible code like this: