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To: Poul-Henning Kamp <phk@critter.tfs.com>
cc: Joe Greco <jgreco@brasil.moneng.mei.com>,
        wollman@lcs.mit.edu (Garrett Wollman), current@FreeBSD.ORG,
        imp@village.org, jkh@time.cdrom.com
Subject: Re: cvs commit: src/sys/dev/ccd ccd.c src/sys/dev/vn vn.c src/sys/sys conf.h src/sys/i386/isa fd.c mcd.c scd.c wcd.c wd.c wt.c s 
In-reply-to: Your message of "Fri, 26 Jul 1996 21:37:22 +0200."
             <3119.838409842@critter.tfs.com> 
From: David Greenman <dg@root.com>
Reply-To: dg@root.com
Date: Fri, 26 Jul 1996 17:32:27 -0700
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>
>As much as I pride myself with never agreeing with Garrett, I'm having a
>hard time finding a reason not to in this particular case.  :-)
>
>There are a couple of fine points still not resolved.
>There is >still< no way to generally specify a policy:
>	"Make all disks foo.bar mode 0640"
>and such.
>
>The major/minor of the underlying nodes are of course of no significance,
>but wouldn't it be nice to get rid of all that blasted code entirely ?
>
>Why would we even care about the type of node apart from "Directory" or
>"Not Directory" ?  Ie, we could mount devfs on a FS that doesn't support
>c/b devs at all (msdos, hfs ...)

   I tend to agree with Poul's opinion...I'd really like to get rid of c/b
devices entirely (in as far as they are types within the filesystem). Only
devfs should know about them. Perhaps the underlying file in Garrett's
suggestion can be of any type - even a regular file of 0 bytes. The new
instances that he talks about being created automatically would be 0 length
regular files.
   If we go for a model like this, I would want it to be controlled with
a (devfs) mount option so that persistence can be turned on and off.

-DG

David Greenman
Core-team/Principal Architect, The FreeBSD Project