also sprach Lindsay Haisley <fmouse-gentoo@fmp.com> [2004.12.20.1856 +0100]:
> Thanks for your concern, Martin ;-)  I actually appreciate
> sensible policy design, and use and recommend Debian to people
> because, among other things, it's very solid in this regard.  My
> point, which perhaps I made overly blunt, is that it's very easy
> from a developer's point of view to get away from the needs of
> real-life in-the-trenches system administration.  I've seen this
> happen too often in otherwise excellent FOSS projects.

Uh, are you arguing for or against permissions.d now?

> This point is well made, but pretty much the same could be said about a
> rules file.  The question that comes to my mind is, what is the most common
> reason that anyone would want to change the device data structure in the
> first place.  Generally, in my experience, it's because a new device has
> been added to the system.  The first place one will probably want to go is
> to an appropriate udev rules file to set up something sensible in /dev for
> the new device, and for this, one-stop shopping is a plus.  I would guess
> that adjusting owner/permissions on existing device nodes is a secondary
> task.

On all systems that I have, the only changes I made to the default
udev ruleset were adjusting permissions. For all I care, rules.d
could be in /usr/share and /etc/udev/rules.d could just as well be
empty... if permissions.d is available.

> There are two problems.  The first is that, in the current udev
> implementation, OWNER, GROUP, MODE in a rules file override
> settings in permissions.d.  The second is the issue of following
> symlinks, which has been discussed at length.  There should be no
> need to run ls -l on /dev to find out if a device node is
> a symlink or not, but that discussion is closed, I believe.

Is it? Is a discussion closed if some of the involved parties simply
refuse to discuss for no reason other than "no, i will not consider
this?"

Making permissions.d optional would be okay, but then please make it
take precedence.

-- 
martin;              (greetings from the heart of the sun.)
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