Re: udev and devfs - The final word

Linus Torvalds
2004-01-05T04:02:37Z

On Mon, 5 Jan 2004 viro@parcelfarce.linux.theplanet.co.uk wrote:
>
> What is _not_ OK, though, is to have folks suddenly see /dev/hda3 changing
> its device number - then we would break existing setups that worked all
> along; even if admin can fix the breakage, it's not a good thing to do.

Ehh, it will actually happen.

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.

And the thing is, with fs labels and udev, even "existing systems" really
shouldn't much care.

Now, we'd probably not want to force the switch, but I do suspect we'll
have exactly this as a switch in the "Kernel Debugging Config" section.
Where even _common_ things like disks could end up with per-bootup values.
Just to verify that every part of the system ends up having it right.

Think of it this way: RedHat not that long ago decided to break with a
_lot_ of tradition by switching over to UTF-8 as the common text encoring.
It broke some _major_ programs in how they dealt with "simple" things like
keyboard input that had worked for literally _decades_.

And you could switch it off if you really wanted to, but quite frankly, it
wasn't even a simple choice in the install. You had to know what you were
doing to switch it off.

And the thing is, that is _the_ single thing that cleaned up a lot of
remaining problems wrt UTF-8 on Linux. Yes, almost all of them had been
solved already, or RH wouldn't have dared do the switch. But to get there
all the way, you had to literally force the cut-over.

(Yeah, I'm a bad person, and I personally went back to the C locale,
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.).

Linus