Date: Fri, 29 May 1998 23:26:48 -0700 From: Mike Smith <mike@smith.net.au> To: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com> Cc: Mike Smith <mike@smith.net.au>, Eivind Eklund <eivind@yes.no>, current@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: I see one major problem with DEVFS... Message-ID: <199805300626.XAA01190@antipodes.cdrom.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Fri, 29 May 1998 23:58:30 PDT." <2867.896511510@time.cdrom.com>
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> > Yes, but you can't *look*at* the template mount to find out what these > > numbers *are*. > > Why *not*? :-) Because it ain't mounted anyhere. Think: user says: # rm /dev/foo0 <expletive> # mknod /dev/foo0 c ??? What are they going to supply for the dev_t? The numbers are dynamic, so there's no possible reference to them. Even if they weren't, there's no guarantee they'd be able to guess them anyway. > I'm also not *against* matching on names, that's fine, I'm simply > arguing that we can never really know just what kinds of custom > sysadmin tools are out there, and if we're handed a request through > mknod(2) for something which used to work, we should probably try and > make it continue to work so that this tool doesn't suddenly break the > day we throw the switch to devfs. Sure. But it's not useful to try to do anything with the major/minor pairs. They don't have any constant meaning; it's the name that's relevant. If in the "transition period" you want to verify that the name and dev match, that's fair enough, but I don't think it's worth encouraging. Yes, if you're the sort of person that renames all their devices as a matter of course, this is going to catch you out. I can't say that's such a bad thing. -- \\ Sometimes you're ahead, \\ Mike Smith \\ sometimes you're behind. \\ mike@smith.net.au \\ The race is long, and in the \\ msmith@freebsd.org \\ end it's only with yourself. \\ msmith@cdrom.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
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