From owner-freebsd-hackers  Thu Aug  7 13:38:40 1997
Return-Path: <owner-freebsd-hackers>
Received: (from root@localhost)
          by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) id NAA29670
          for hackers-outgoing; Thu, 7 Aug 1997 13:38:40 -0700 (PDT)
Received: from phaeton.artisoft.com (phaeton.Artisoft.COM [198.17.250.50])
          by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) with SMTP id NAA29665
          for <hackers@FreeBSD.ORG>; Thu, 7 Aug 1997 13:38:38 -0700 (PDT)
Received: (from terry@localhost) by phaeton.artisoft.com (8.6.11/8.6.9) id NAA22951; Thu, 7 Aug 1997 13:35:26 -0700
From: Terry Lambert <terry@lambert.org>
Message-Id: <199708072035.NAA22951@phaeton.artisoft.com>
Subject: Re: large minor numbers
To: grog@lemis.com (Greg Lehey)
Date: Thu, 7 Aug 1997 13:35:26 -0700 (MST)
Cc: ada@not-enough.bandwidth.org, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG
In-Reply-To: <199708070812.RAA24898@freebie.lemis.com> from "Greg Lehey" at Aug 7, 97 05:42:38 pm
X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24]
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG
X-Loop: FreeBSD.org
Precedence: bulk

> > On the topic of minor numbers for certain devices, it was mentioned that
> > there was no 8-bit limit upon these.  Has it occurred to anyone to fix
> > tar to understand these?  If I do a tar of /dev, it'll give me a bunch of
> > errors saying 'minor number too large'.
> 
> The trouble is, tar is a portable format, and it's one of its greatest
> advantages.  If you "fix" it for large minor numbers, you'll break it
> for exchange to anything else.

The real "fix" is to go to devfs; with devfs, it simply makes no
sense to backup (or restore) device nodes, period.


					Terry Lambert
					terry@lambert.org
---
Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present
or previous employers.