Date: Fri, 25 Oct 2002 18:37:52 +0200 From: Poul-Henning Kamp <phk@critter.freebsd.dk> To: "M. Warner Losh" <imp@bsdimp.com> Cc: cvs-committers@FreeBSD.org, cvs-all@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: cvs commit: src/lib/libdisk Makefile chunk.c write_alpha_disk.c write_i386_disk.c write_pc98_disk.c Message-ID: <20131.1035563872@critter.freebsd.dk> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Fri, 25 Oct 2002 10:06:23 MDT." <20021025.100623.66111903.imp@bsdimp.com>
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In message <20021025.100623.66111903.imp@bsdimp.com>, "M. Warner Losh" writes: >In message: <13867.1035534182@critter.freebsd.dk> > Poul-Henning Kamp <phk@critter.freebsd.dk> writes: >: In message <20021024.180717.57021784.imp@bsdimp.com>, "M. Warner Losh" writes: >: >: >Oh Come off of it Poul. You broke existing practice. Admit it. The >: >convention has existed since the deep, dark past. It was well >: >established in FreeBSD as smelling right. Sure, it didn't smell right >: >to a sysV person, but that's irrelevant. >: >: Please research our history on this topic: you need to go back 4ス >: years or so. >: >: The amount of jubilation in Jordans commit messages to rev 1.51.2.59 and >: 1.106 to src/usr.sbin/sysinstall/config.c is not without reason. > >This is not about sysinstall. This is about /etc/fstab, /etc/rc.conf >and any other places where device names are used. If you had gone back and read the thread you would know that it was not "just about sysinstall". >There are large >numbers of machines that still have the compatibility stuff. I doubt it is a very large percentage because systems have been installed with sliced device named four many releases now, and people would have to actively go and edit their /etc/fstab (etc) to change it. >If you >want to increse the already insane level of pain to upgrade to 5.0, >then go ahead and break them. You know, we may actually _decrease_ the insanity level a lot by requiring a reinstall. >I really don't like your beligerent "I'm right, you are wrong, so >flake off" attitude on this. When people have repeated "but I LIKE it this way" N times, my diplomacy tries to solve "The halting problem" rather than continue. > Provide justification for the change, or >go fix the breakage. So far you've just asserted it is right without >any sort of justification, which is completely unacceptible. The justification was given in ample amount 4+ years ago, but here are the high-lights again: 1: It confuses users. The reason why you don't hear much about this now is that for four years we have installed systems with consistent names by default. 2: It does not reflect what is on the disk, which adds complexity and failure modes to our software, both userland kernel and bootcode. 3: Aliasing disk devices is a bad idea. You don't want people to accidentally mount /dev/da0a and /dev/da0s1a at the same time so you have to add complexity to your kernel side code to prevent this. 4: /dev/da0a is the legitimate name for a disk which has _only_ a BSD disklabel on it. The name in no way signals to the user that there is an MBR somewhere that the user also needs to attend to in a number of circumstances. At typical failuremode here is: "My disk wont boot", "Right is the FreeBSD slice active in the MBR ?", "There is no MBR!", "Yes there is", "No there isn't!" etc etc. 5: This entire thing is a bloody bikeshed! Nobody cares about the fact that we get an Disk IO system which is multi-architecture, modular, extensible, Giant-free etc etc, instead they focus on the one little detail they _do_ understand, and make a lot of noise, just to show how much they are "in the loop"! -- Poul-Henning Kamp | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20 phk@FreeBSD.ORG | TCP/IP since RFC 956 FreeBSD committer | BSD since 4.3-tahoe Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe cvs-all" in the body of the message
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