Re: udev and devfs - The final word

[viro@parcelfarce.linux.theplanet.co.uk]

On Mon, Jan 05, 2004 at 05:17:20PM -0800, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> 
> 
> On Tue, 6 Jan 2004 viro@parcelfarce.linux.theplanet.co.uk wrote:
> > 
> > Cute.  There's a little issue of, say it, meaningful relationship between
> > sda and sda4, completely lost that way.  And _that_ has nothing to do with
> > device enumeration.
> 
> Oh, don't look too closely at some pseudo-code, it's not like the code
> would actually do that for a minor number. But for things like major
> number allocation for disk devices, it might not be too far off. And we 
> migth even want to start off the minors at some "random" offset (obviously 
> while keeping the alignment right for the partition handling)

True, but...  Let me put it that way - entire area is a minefield and
I would really like to avoid nasty surprises from "obvious" patches,
what with having just spent 4 months dealing with the fallout from one
such beast.

Let's clean the things up first; then it will be easier to see what can
and should be done.  Sure thing, reducing amount of places that deal with
device numbers is a good thing.  Let's see how far we can get it, what
obstacles still remain (and during 2.5 a _lot_ of them had been killed)
and what is needed to remove the rest.

Once they are gone (and that will be one-by-one, keeping the list of
things to grep for and checking the results of greps as we go) - then
we'll have cleaner playing field for any experiments in that area.
_And_ there will be less temptation to play the bundling games for
everyone involved (cf. devfs disaster, aka. "my glorious idea allows
to do $NEEDED_THING that way; merge the entire thing and nevermind
the fact that doing $NEEDED_THING essentially the same way is possible
without the rest of patch and can be split out of it").