Re: removable media revalidation - udev vs. devfs or static /dev

[Valdis.Kletnieks@vt.edu]

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On Wed, 07 Jan 2004 14:25:44 CST, Richard Troth said:

> Consider the long-range ramifications
> if a device can also be a directory,  just "magically".
> I'm not going to automatically diss the idea  (other than my
> natural reaction above)  but please consider beyond the immediate hack.

If it's so ugly, why do Solaris and Irix not have a problem in making a
device graph that looks somewhat like that as well?  The idea is *not*
so crazy as to discard out-of-hand.  Perhaps what you need is:

/dev/hda/disk  whole-disk access
/dev/hda/0     partition 0
/dev/hda/1     partition 1
... etc

> It reminds me of AIX from the days when it ran on PCs.
> They had this neat trick of  "hidden directories"  (for a different
> purpose).   It looked like an executable,  but really was a
> directory containing multiple executables for various platforms.
> (This version of AIX also ran on the mainframe, AIX/386 and AIX/370.)
> There were/are better ways of solving the problem they were addressing.

You think that was ugly, you should have seen it around the F17 level when
there were still some bugs in there (you haven't lived till you see the ooglyness
of an 'rsh' between TCF cluster members of different flavors - it propagated
the environment variable that controlled that stuff.. :)

Incidentally, I'm told that HP/UX has a similar concept, at least in some
releases...


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