From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S266058AbUAFBUl (ORCPT ); Mon, 5 Jan 2004 20:20:41 -0500 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S266059AbUAFBUl (ORCPT ); Mon, 5 Jan 2004 20:20:41 -0500 Received: from us01smtp2.synopsys.com ([198.182.44.80]:9097 "EHLO kiruna.synopsys.com") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S266058AbUAFBUj (ORCPT ); Mon, 5 Jan 2004 20:20:39 -0500 Reply-To: From: "Paul Zimmerman" To: "Rob Landley" Cc: Subject: Re: udev and devfs - The final word Date: Mon, 5 Jan 2004 17:20:37 -0800 Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 (Normal) X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook IMO, Build 9.0.2416 (9.0.2911.0) Importance: Normal X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V6.00.2600.0000 Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org On Tuesday 06 January 2004 00:31 Rob Landley wrote: > What about kernel upgrades? Future backwards compatability when developers > change the device enumeration methods? (The sata driver got completely > rewritten from scratch, and now it detects devices in a wildly different > order, but we need this shim layer for backwards compatability with a > guarantee we never should have made because we encouraged old scripts to > remain broken.) This plants hidden land mines restricting future > development. You're basically proposing a whole "device number stabilization > infrastructure" for future kernels if it's to have ANY meaning at all... Did people really write scripts that used major:minor numbers to refer to devices? I would have thought they would use the /dev/xxx name, and those will not change when "random" device numbers are implemented, will they? - Paul