Joerg Schilling wrote:
It is present on a lot more machines than SCSI CD/DVD drives these days. While it's true that the user can suppress it, it's present in the major distributions, and I can't remember seeing any Linux system with /proc disabled in years.Bill Davidsen <davidsen@tmr.com> wrote:Note that the most user-friendly of all, Linux, which has specified ALL cd devices for years in /proc/sys/dev/cdrom/info, is not on the aboveNote that with cdrtools-2.01.01a20, you no longer need to specify the "dev=" parameter if you have only one CD/DVD drive and if the OS is user friendly. This applies to Solaris, FreeBSD, BeOS, HP-UX, IRIX, MS-WIN, NextSTep, SCO-UnixWare, SCO-OpenServer.Cdrecord will on these OS just scan the SCSI address space for possible drives and use the one if exactly one is found.This is simply not true. This strange and basically useless /proc/sys/dev/cdrom/info has not been a default interface.
The reality is that (a) almost no one uses SCSI optical devices, even if SCSI disk is in use, (b) there is a lot more use and support for Linux than any (or possibly all) of the legacy systems you mention as standard, and (c) the systems you like so well now support use of device names. That's the reality.list. Linux includes SCSI, IDE, Firewire, USB, and SATA on the list. The problem is that Linux long ago saw reality and realized that most users didn't think in terms of SCSI numbers, particularly not when the devices were not SCSI, so they switched to names.Looks like you loose connectivity to reality.
The library was a wonderful thing... once. But it persists in a decade old view of peripherals. A valid path to a device can be determined from the name, there is no need to know or care if the device could be accessed in other ways, any more than having more than one name in DNS resolve to a given IP will make the IP unusable.Cdrtools are based on generic SCSI (libscg) and recent Linux versions lackONE orthogonal interface to access all SCSI devices. It does not help to have an infinite number of overlapping interfaces that are even implemented in a malicius way to prevent tools from detecting and identifying drives that are visible via more than one interface.
Having run 30+ machines with TB of SCSI drives and tapes each until a few months ago, I'm happy to say the problems are of your making, trying to use old methods instead of adapting current practice. I'm sorry to see it, but the world is moving in another direction.For this reason, Linux is definitely not userfriendly for SCSI users.
-- bill davidsen <davidsen@tmr.com> CTO TMR Associates, Inc Doing interesting things with small computers since 1979