Theodore Y. Ts'o writes:
> Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2000 16:11:21 +1100
> From: Richard Gooch <rgooch@atnf.csiro.au>
>
> I'd advocate we move from a "tough, use procfs" attitude to a "tough,
> use devfs" attitude. If you don't want to have devfs in your kernel,
> you wouldn't want procfs either (if being consistent). After all,
> devfs doesn't *have* to be mounted over /dev.
>
> You know, it wasn't that long ago that you said that using devfs
> should be a choice, and not something that would ever be forced.
> Now you're saying "tough, use devfs". I guess your earlier
> statements were just made to pursuade people to accept it into the
> kernel, and now you're changing your mind?
I'm afraid it's not as devious as you'd like to make out. In recent
days people have been talking about "cleaning up /proc". In that
context, it's not inconsistent to advocate using devfs.
Furthermore, as Peter pointed out last week, we're better off putting
stuff in devfs than procfs, since at least devfs tries to solve some
problems. It doesn't make sense to argue against devfs yet argue for
procfs. If you do that, it just sounds like "I don't like Richard's
devfs because I don't like it".
> As far as devfs not having to be mounted over /dev, if we *are*
> going to move to a world where for certain functionality devfs is
> mandatory, it would be useful to standardize using a standard
> pathname for accessing devfs --- say, /devfs. If you do want to
> mount devfs over /dev, then /devfs can be a symlink to /dev. If you
> don't want to mount devfs over /dev, then devfs can just be mounted
> on top of /devfs.
Yes, that would work.
> This way, application programs that need fixed, compiled-in paths
> can just use /devfs and be guaranteed to work on both kinds of
> systems.
The way I envisioned it, a disc-based /dev would have (for example)
/dev/cpu being a symlink to $devfsroot/cpu
Having two hierarchies encoded isn't good.
Regards,
Richard....
Permanent: rgooch@atnf.csiro.au
Current: rgooch@ras.ucalgary.ca
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