Re: udev device naming policy concerns
I demand that Andreas Metzler may or may not have written...
> Tore Anderson <tore@debian.org> wrote:
>> I'll just start by quoting Marco d'Itri (the udev maintainer) notes about
>> this subject from README.Debian:
>>> Naming policy
>>> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~
>>> The plan, so far, is to have the default configuration create devfs-like
>>> devices. Compatibility symlinks will be created for common devices for
>>> which the new names are still not used by defaults by programs, but the
>>> goal is to remove most of these links.
> [...]
> I think Tore has made a pretty strong case already I would like to hear an
> answer to a simple "Why?" by Marco.
While I can't speak for Marco, I can certainly say why I would do something
like this:
Some people are using devfs and may be using devfs-style device names.
Dumping these could break things for these people when they upgrade to udev,
whereas retaining them gives these people a chance to play with udev without
having to alter anything and revert to devfs if need be.
It's also possible that the devfs-style names could be lurking, forgotten, in
some configuration files... that said, maybe that's a good reason to *dump*
the devfs names. I'm not sure that the affected people would be happy about
it, though ;-)
FWIW, I'm running udev on my laptop without problems (kernel 2.6.2), but I'm
not running it on my desktop boxes. I plan to continue to use 2.4-series
kernels on one of them, but I'd quite like to run 2.6.x+udev on the other;
however, devfs it is for now because the DVB drivers don't yet support sysfs.
(Well, that and some odd process-hangs which look like what's reported in
<URL:http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-kernel&m=107697302004071>. I
should probably retry 2.6.2.)
> One of the major obstacles that kept devfs from being adopted by a wider
> audience (besides the racing conditions) was its default naming scheme,
> duplicating this in udev does not look advisable to me.
Let's just sum up the above as "compatibility reasons" :-)
> This is nothing personal, I have been using devfs since I switched to 2.4
<AOL>.
> (I am not using it when booting 2.6, as it is obsolete and devfsd has not
> been updated).
My impression is that it has, at least, been maintained. I think that it'll
be retained as long as 2.6 is maintained, but removed completely in 2.7. (Of
course, ICBW...)
--
| Darren Salt | linux (or ds) at | nr. Ashington,
| woody, sarge, | youmustbejoking | Northumberland
| RISC OS | demon co uk | Toon Army
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