From owner-freebsd-current Sat May 30 00:31:15 1998 Return-Path: Received: (from majordom@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) id AAA09853 for freebsd-current-outgoing; Sat, 30 May 1998 00:31:15 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from owner-freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG) Received: from antipodes.cdrom.com (castles135.castles.com [208.214.165.135]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id AAA09848 for ; Sat, 30 May 1998 00:31:13 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from mike@antipodes.cdrom.com) Received: from antipodes.cdrom.com (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by antipodes.cdrom.com (8.8.8/8.8.5) with ESMTP id XAA01190; Fri, 29 May 1998 23:26:48 -0700 (PDT) Message-Id: <199805300626.XAA01190@antipodes.cdrom.com> X-Mailer: exmh version 2.0zeta 7/24/97 To: "Jordan K. Hubbard" cc: Mike Smith , Eivind Eklund , current@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: I see one major problem with DEVFS... In-reply-to: Your message of "Fri, 29 May 1998 23:58:30 PDT." <2867.896511510@time.cdrom.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Date: Fri, 29 May 1998 23:26:48 -0700 From: Mike Smith Sender: owner-freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG > > 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 # 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