Re: How to package device files?

["Joel Baker" <lucifer@lightbearer.com>]

On Thu, May 30, 2002 at 02:10:07PM -0400, Michael Stone wrote:
> On Thu, May 30, 2002 at 12:58:48PM -0500, Adam Heath wrote:
> > I also think that might have been a hold over from when we couldn't
> > override permissions of files. Since permissions on devices are changed
> > very often(as compared to normal dirs/files), I believe it became
> > policy to not ship device files in debs.
> >
> > Maybe it's time to revisit this?
>
> No. I don't want to have to learn the dpkg stat-overrides mechanism to
> chmod a device entry. It's too opaque and doesn't buy anything. It also
> conflicts with devfs.

Not to mention the fact that some other kernels don't use the same device
node numbers as Linux... while we can do hackery in a MAKEDEV script fairly
easily, to catch common names and do soemthing useful with them (in many
cases it should 'just work', in fact), trying to cope with doing direct
numeric mknods is going to cause your package to be utterly uninstallable
on any of the non-linux arches. If it's a Linux-specific package, that's
no big deal, of course, but it's something to keep in mind if it's not.

Abstraction is your friend.
-- 
***************************************************************************
Joel Baker                           System Administrator - lightbearer.com
lucifer@lightbearer.com              http://users.lightbearer.com/lucifer/


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