Re: udev device naming policy concerns
On Mar 05, Tore Anderson <tore@debian.org> wrote:
As I'm not really interested in arguing over this, I will reply only to
a few of the comments.
> First of all, devfs is considered obsolete by the upstream kernel
> maintainers.
devfs is considered obsolete because nobody was willing to fix its
brokeness. I do not remember anybody declaring anything about the naming
style.
> I'll also wager that if we go with the devfs naming style we'll be the
> odd man out.
Well... this is the only argument I find compelling. Since millions of
flies cannot be wrong and I am not interested enough in the default
setting to fight this battle, I will switch udev to an almost-flat
naming scheme in one or two releases.
> The Linux kernel itself, and the upstream udev sources,
> names the devices the standardized (ttyS0) style and doesn't, as far as
The linux kernel does not dictate a naming policy. A big argument in
favour of udev (and against devfs) is that the device names should be
assigned by user space.
> I know, have -any- plans to change that. The same goes for Red Hat, and
> probably the most of the other major distributions. The only one I know
> of that's adopted devfs as the default is Gentoo, and according to their
> site they're about to ditch devfs (and I believe their udev package does
> the exact oposite of ours and creates compability symlinks for those
> already using the devfs names, and that they mean to get rid of it
> completely after their users have had some transitioning time).
You can easily check the udev.rules.gentoo file and see for yourself
that gentoo is still committed to a devfs-like naming scheme.
> 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.
I never intended to do this. I consider the devfs naming style superior
on its own merits.
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.
This has been my experience as well. Almost all of our packages support
devfs names anyway. You obviously have to use the correct devices in
fstab and inittab if you choose to disable compatibility symlinks.
Steve Greenland:
>There's no need for a
>debconf question, though, as it will work fine out of the box, and one
>can change simply by copying the example into place and rebooting.
Agreed. I'm not going to use debconf unless it will be necessary.
Claus Färber quoted FHS and the LANANA registry. The first has not
mandated any naming style since version 2.2 (almost three years old),
while the second has obviously never been normative for devices names
as devfs implemented a different scheme.
--
ciao, |
Marco | [4985 sp0k0qkcFh13U]
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