On Fri, Mar 05, 2004 at 05:45:55PM +0100, Tore Anderson wrote: > * Tollef Fog Heen > > > I think you are overestimating the problems. I used to run without > > any compat symlinks, just devfs, and apart from the fact that you have > > to fix inittab, it mostly Just Worked. > > When I experimented with devfs and attempted to run without the symlinks > my system broke down to the point of not booting fully, due to the fact > that the devices where my system partitions was supposed to be located > (/dev/hda1 and such) wasn't available any longer. After having fixed > that I just found that many other things was broken, such as for instance > XMMS (due to the missing /dev/dsp and /dev/mixer), my floppy drive > was inaccessible (no /dev/fd0 either), and so on for almost every piece > of software using device nodes directly. It surprises me to hear that > you didn't run into such problems, but then again, I did my testing for > quite some time ago - things may have changed since then. Things certainly have. For me, the big changes I had to make were fstab, lilo.conf, inittab. Large chunks of Debian is already devfs-aware, (I dunno about xmms but) mpg123 for example will try both /dev/dsp and /dev/sound/dsp. And of course, alsa's modules appear in the same place under both devfs and normal operation. Apart from things like rng-tools, psaux-using devices and microcode.ctl (for which I've locally moved the devices out of /dev/misc/ since that's a meaningless distinction to me, and now I can set those packages back to default) I haven't had to hunt for device nodes in years.... (Well, cdrecord complains that open by devicename is unsupported, but it also dislikes ide devices so even if I did supply the nodes it wanted, it wouldn't be happy) > Anyway, my complaint isn't that it will be technically impossible to > build a system exclusively using non-standard device names, be it > devfs names or something else entirely, but rather that this attempt to > do so right now is undesireable and serves no good purpose. > The current naming scheme is, after all, a universally accepted and > ubiquitous standard, one which has been formalized by the Free Standards > Group, and one which no major player in the GNU/Linux arena seem intent > on changing in the foreseeable future. I believe we should have a very > compelling rationale at the table before deciding to stray from it. I think the devfs naming scheme is better personally, as it gives you a structured view of what's in the system, and a structured way of dealing with devices... (IE v4l stuff lives in /dev/video, easy.) On the other hand, I can understand your point about not migrating away from the documented, standardised approach, (ugly as it may be :-)... The current default files create nodes in the devfs places, and symlink to the kernel names for the ide/scsi stuff. Maybe it ought to create nodes with the kernel names, and symlink to the devfs-style names? After all, local configuration is quite esay to change. (In my case, I just whacked the %k from the scsi/ide strings since I'm migrating from devfs)... And/or provide examples of different schemes. I suspect the old-style naming config file would probably be a one line udev.rules: KERNEL="*" NAME="%k" -- ----------------------------------------------------------- Paul "TBBle" Hampson, MCSE 6th year CompSci/Asian Studies student, ANU The Boss, Bubblesworth Pty Ltd (ABN: 51 095 284 361) Paul.Hampson@Anu.edu.au "No survivors? Then where do the stories come from I wonder?" -- Capt. Jack Sparrow, "Pirates of the Caribbean" This email is licensed to the recipient for non-commercial use, duplication and distribution. -----------------------------------------------------------
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