Re: udev device naming policy concerns

[Tore Anderson <tore@debian.org>]

* 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.

  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.

-- 
Tore Anderson