Re: udev and devfs - The final word

Linus Torvalds
2004-01-05T04:54:45Z

On Mon, 5 Jan 2004 viro@parcelfarce.linux.theplanet.co.uk wrote:

> > If nothing else, things like SATA will end up meaning that the device you
> > were used to seeign as /dev/hdc will suddenly show up as /dev/scd0
> > instead. Just because you changed the cabling while you upgraded to a
> > newer version of your CD-ROM drive.
>
> If I open the damn box, I sure as hell can be bothered to edit stuff in
> /etc...

Actually, not necessarily.

The thing is, _the_ most common reason I have for opening the box is that
the effing thing started having problems.

At which point I want to just remove the disk, move it to another box, and
boot up the other box.

And THAT is exactly the kind of situation where I sure as hell don't want
to care exactly where the disk was. I can't "prepare" for it by editing
files in /etc, since I don't know that the CPU fan or whatever is going to
die on me.

And this is _exactly_ why we should try to get away from device numbering
having any meaning. Because if we do this right, something like the CPU
fan dying, and me moving a disk to a new machine that has SATA (with the
disk having both SATA and PATA connectors), I shouldn't need to even
_think_ about it.

That's where "mount by label" does part of the job. But if the system is
_always_ set up to do things like NFS exports according to some separate
UUID, that too would "just work".

There's a lot to be said for "just work". Even if sometimes it takes some
pain when you break old (and broken) assumptions.

> > because "pine" still doesn't get UTF-8 right, and nobody is apparently
> > ever going to fix it. Oh, well. But at least I know I'm doing something
> > _wrong_, which in itself is a good thing.).
>
> Heh. Took you long enough - "using pine" should've been a dead giveaway
> from the very beginning ;-)

Those are them fighting words.

But since you brought it up: do you actually have anything else that can
open a remote IMAP file with a few thousand messages without taking ages
for it, and that you don't have to mouse around with? I'd like a graphical
interface for configuring stuff etc, but I sure as hell don't want to find
some f*ing icon to save a few messages that I selected in-order to my
"doit" queue or go to the next one, or pipe the thing to a shell-script,
or any number of things that are my actual _job_.

And the "no mousing" means that I don't want to have some popup window
that asks me what file I want to save into or similar crap. I can type
fast enough if I stay on the keyboard and can focus on one part of the
screen, but if I have to switch my focus around, I'm a goner.

On a related matter, I'm probably a retard, but I've tried alternatives to
"trn" too, and there really aren't any. None of the graphical news readers
can show me one full page of threads, select the 3-4 threads from _that_
one page that I want (from the keyboard), and then kill _that_ one page.
Not the whole newsgroup: only the part that shows in the window at that
time.

In "trn", the magic command is capital-D, for "discard".

Linus