Re: udev device naming policy concerns
* Andreas Metzler
> I think Tore has made a pretty strong case already I would like to hear
> an answer to a simple "Why?" by Marco.
* Darren Salt
> 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.
Attempts to help users who are going to make the transition from
devfs->udev are all well and good. That can easily be accomplished by
for instance providing rule files in /usr/share/doc/udev/examples/ which
will ensure the creation of symlinks from the devfs location of a device
(say, /dev/vc/0) to the real location (/dev/tty0).
What really is the issue here is that devfs naming need not, and should
not, be made the standard just to achieve smooth upgrades for users of
devfs, which never even was the default Debian way of handling /dev.
* Andreas Metzler
> (I am not using it when booting 2.6, as it is obsolete and devfsd has not
> been updated).
* Darren Salt
> 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...)
No, it's unmaintained short of going through some aputations now and
then. From the latest kernel sources:
> Note that devfs has been obsoleted by udev,
> <http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/kernel/hotplug/>.
> It has been stripped down to a bare minimum and is only provided for
> legacy installations that use its naming scheme which is
> unfortunately different from the names normal Linux installations
> use.
And yet, here we are trying to make the obsolete and "unfortunate"
naming scheme the default. An ill-advised decision if I ever saw one.
--
Tore Anderson
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