Re: FW: Parallel Tape vs. PacketTwin - pt name clash (fwd)

Philip Blundell (philb@gnu.org)
Wed, 29 Jul 1998 19:17:53 +0100


>Option 3 would be ok, except you are assuming that no one is
>maintaining the PacketTwin driver, and no one has written
>software that depends on the pt driver being the PacketTwin.

No software _can_ depend on that in any sane way, because its name is purely a
kernel internal thing. Whereas the parallel-tape pt driver has nodes in /dev
named after it that programs *must* use.

>Option 4 is not nice, ignoring a problem will only create larger
>ones later. A person using SuSE decides they need PacketTwin
>support, so they grab a kernel source tree and compile their own
>and boom - instant problem.

Only if they decide to include support for both "pt" drivers as modules.
Otherwise there is no problem.

>This raises the question - who is responsible for coordinating device
>driver names and numbers for the kernel?

Names - basically nobody. Numbers - see devices.txt.

p.

-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu
Please read the FAQ at http://www.altern.org/andrebalsa/doc/lkml-faq.html