Re: LANANA: To Pending Device Number Registrants

Linus Torvalds
2001-05-16T20:19:39Z

On Wed, 16 May 2001, Richard Gooch wrote:
> >
> > This is still a really bad idea. You don't want to tie this kind of
> > things to the name.
>
> Why do you think it's a bad idea?

Well, one reason names are bad is that they don't always exist.

If you only have the fd (remember that unix notion of using <stdin> and
<stdout>), you'd have no clue where the thing came from. So something else
than the name is certainly a good idea for some of these issues.

That said, I still think the real problem is rampant use of ioctl's, which
are a bad idea in the first place. Magic numbers are always bad, and are a
sign of bad design.

Linus