Date: Tue, 01 Apr 1997 20:17:05 -0800 From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com> To: Terry Lambert <terry@lambert.org> Cc: nate@mt.sri.com (Nate Williams), proff@suburbia.net, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Internal clock Message-ID: <28836.859954625@time.cdrom.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Tue, 01 Apr 1997 16:55:20 MST." <199704012355.QAA12469@phaeton.artisoft.com>
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> We *have* a well designed and thought out device interface: devfs. Well thought-out, yes. Finished, no. :) > I have *no* idea what is preventing you from making it the default > mechanism. 1. It has no persistance and a number of people have already told me directly (some of them at USENIX, immediately following Julian's talk on DEVFS) that we will be roundly castigated and screamed at in the various public forums for breaking /dev's historical behavior if we don't make persistance work and work *completely transparently*. Let's say somebody has a "securify" script that they run on a new system as part of their security auditing process. It's been running on FreeBSD systems since 2.0, making sure that tape drives and CDROMs and such all have sane perms (or maybe even some sort of "insane" perms which are part of a more elaborate ownership scheme which they like), and now suddenly with FreeBSD 4.0 or whatever they find that everything the script does on these new systems is undone after a reboot. Say what?? Sure, one can stick something in /etc/rc.local which does everything from beating on /dev to translating the catpages into Urdu, but the fact remains that someone shouldn't need to do that. As you yourself say, things should stay *backwards compatible*. :-) 2. It tends to panic the system fairly regularly on steady use. Why on earth would we make something this dangerous the default? It's simply not finished yet, and there are numerous open PRs against it in the PR database (#2033, #2034, #2738 and possibly #1211). Jordan
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