Re: no need for a devfs

John G. Alvord (jalvo@cloud9.net)
Mon, 12 Jan 1998 08:42:22 GMT


On Sun, 11 Jan 1998 18:49:03 +0100, Pavel Machek <pavel@elf.ucw.cz>
wrote:

>Hi!
>
>> It's fragile. But then, so is the proposed replacement.
>>
>> What you probably really want is something like this:
>>
>> * for each partition, determine a unique id somehow (ext2 already has
>> this, and so does FAT)
>
>I like to copy partitions byte-to-byte. If I did this to what you
>propose, I would break too many things.
>
>> And it works for every disk type, not only SCSI disks.
>
>It does not work for other SCSI devices, such as scanners.

If there is a duplcate automatic symbolic name, the code could leave a
duplicate physcial name without a symbolic mount point. The system (or
the etc/fstab?) could mount the device with a user supplied name later
in initial or during later processing. This would also handle cases
like scanners which wouldn't have data to be read for a symbolic mount
point name.

john alvord