Re: I give up

[Jeff Garzik <jeff@garzik.org>]

Gene Heskett wrote:
> On Tuesday 10 April 2007, Olaf Hering wrote:
>> On Mon, Apr 09, Dave Dillow wrote:
>>> It's not /dev he's backing up -- its /home, /usr, and others. GNU tar
>>> saves the device and inode numbers from the {,l}stat() call on each
>>> file and decides it is a new file if either number changes from run to
>>> run.
>> So fix tar to not do silly things.
>> Kernel major:minor numbers are not stable.
> 
> YOU Tell that to the tar/star people, they are flabbergasted that its not 
> stable.  It apparently is for every other OS tar can be run on.

It's just the new world that we live in.

I don't see us ever going back to 100% static major/minors.

Though as a point of history, Linux has /always/ supported dynamic 
major/minor numbers, even back in 0.99 days.  We avoided the problem 
then because the dynamic major/minors were only used by drivers that had 
not yet had static numbers assigned, or their author chose to avoid 
LANANA for some other reason.

	Jeff