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Date:      Thu, 18 Nov 1999 21:33:19 -0800
From:      "William R. Somsky" <wrsomsky@halcyon.com>
To:        stable@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Making local devices: /dev/MAKEDEV.local or something else?
Message-ID:  <19991118213319.A28160@gramarye.halcyon.com>

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With the talk of a 3.4-release starting to take shape, I figured it
would be time to put forth an idea/question/thought that's been 
stirring about the back of my mind:

Doing a "sh MAKEDEV all" builds all the standard and default devices
for a system, but there are usually other that are needed for any
given system.  For example, on my home system I also have to add
wd0s2a, wd0s1, wd0s5, wd2s2a, wd2s5, and snd0.  The question is,
how should these be made as needed?  Explicit invocations of
"sh MAKEDEV other_devices_I_want"?  (I don't want to have to
remember all of these all the time.) Should MAKEDEV.local be
edited to make them when invoked?  (The framework of the
supplied example MAKEDEV.local doesn't seem to jive with that
very well, however.)  I've currently got a script /dev/ALL
that invokes "sh MAKEDEV all and_the_other_devices"?

I've been thinking of the following idea:  what if "sh MAKEDEV all"
makes all the devices that it normally does, but if there is a
file /dev/ADDITIONAL, it will additionally make all the devices
listed in that file.  The patch for this (against 3.3-stable) is:

*** MAKEDEV.orig	Thu Nov 18 21:18:03 1999
--- MAKEDEV	Thu Nov 18 21:20:38 1999
***************
*** 239,244 ****
--- 239,247 ----
  	sh MAKEDEV i4b i4bctl i4btrc0 i4btrc1		# cdev, ISDN
  	sh MAKEDEV i4btel0 i4btel1 i4bteld0 i4bteld1	# cdev, ISDN
  	sh MAKEDEV i4brbch0 i4brbch1			# cdev, ISDN
+ 	if [ -s ADDITIONAL ]; then			# local additions
+ 	  sh MAKEDEV `cat ADDITIONAL`
+ 	fi
  	;;
  
  std)

With the contents of /dev/ADDITIONAL in my case being:

wd0s2a wd0s1 wd0s5
wd2s2a wd2s5
snd0

But the question is, is this a good idea?  Or is this completely out of
whack?  Is there a better way to accomplish my general desire of making
it easy to regenerate all the necessary devices for a system?  Maybe
there's a better place to put the file? (/etc/ADDITIONAL_DEVS?)  Or
maybe it should come from /etc/rc.conf? (ADD_DEVICES="snd0 ..."?
probably not...)

Anyone got any ideas/comments on the subject?

________________________________________________________________________
William R. Somsky                                   wrsomsky@halcyon.com
Physicist, Baritone, Guitarist           http://www.halcyon.com/wrsomsky


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