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Date: Sun, 23 Mar 2003 16:32:23 +0000
From: Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org>
To: Roman Zippel <zippel@linux-m68k.org>
Cc: Greg KH <greg@kroah.com>, Andries.Brouwer@cwi.nl,
       linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, akpm@digeo.com
Subject: Re: [PATCH] alternative dev patch
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	Roman Zippel <zippel@linux-m68k.org>, Greg KH <greg@kroah.com>,
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In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.44.0303231557230.5042-100000@serv>; from zippel@linux-m68k.org on Sun, Mar 23, 2003 at 04:05:24PM +0100
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On Sun, Mar 23, 2003 at 04:05:24PM +0100, Roman Zippel wrote:
> > Yeah, but as I know, it's a big pain in the butt.  Let's make it easy to
> > do this, don't make writing a driver tougher than it has to be (it's
> > already much harder than it used to be.)  Andries's patch makes it easy,
> > which is a good thing in my book.
> 
> Andries' patch doesn't help at all and only makes things worse. Only very 
> few drivers should have to deal with the major/minor business. Most 
> drivers should just do add_serial_device/add_tape_device/... and these 
> function will do the right thing (e.g. announce the new device via sysfs).

Yupp.  The add_serial_device/add_tape_device/ would also have the benefit
that they could keept track of devfs like the gendisk handling when
GENHD_FL_DEVFS is set by the drivers - lots of cruft can be remove from
drivers and midlayers incrementally.