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SubjectRe: devfs again, (was RE: USB device allocation)

Ah, the devfs Holy War - before people get to heavily involved in what
UNIX should be, because DAMN IT, I KNOW WHAT UNIX SHOULD BE AND I AM
ALWAYS RIGHT rhetoric ... you might consider that other OSes, like IRIX,
have done similar things with their hardware fs (not the same setup as
devfs, but similar in concept to create a tree that just has the devices
that are currently on the system)

this argument is pathetic... a philosophical holy war from a bunch of
voices with strict opnions defining their arguments and not presenting
a clear logical argument for why this is such a horrid design to
introduce in the kernel...

Excerpts from internet.computing.linux-kernel: 7-Oct-99 Re: devfs again,
(was RE: U.. by Horst von Brand@inf.utfs
>
> "Jakma, Paul" <Paul.Jakma@compaq.com> said:
> > > > the permissions in a config file, exact syntax i forget,
> > > but something like:
> > > >
> > > > /dev/sd/c0b1t3u0 PERM root.disk 664
> > > > /dev/sd PERM root.disk 660
> > > >
> > > > etc.. and all your SCSI disks will automatically get these
> > > perm's when
> > > > they're created, except for disk bus1id3, which get's
> > > special perms's.. etc.
> > > >
> > > > now that's nice. Much easier to admin, which leads to
> > > better security, etc.
>
>
> This is _horrible_. Suddenly there are files whose attributes aren't fixed
> by chmod(1)/chown(1), but by a magic file.
>
> Again. The way Unix is designed, permanent information about files resides
> in the filesystem. Another basic Unix design premise is that devices are
> files. So their attributes reside in the filesystem. Anything else breaks
> much ("tar cf dev.tar /dev", ..., "tar xf dev.tar /dev" doesn't work
> anymore (but it looks like it does!); can't dump/restore /dev; ...). It
> might also have _very_ serious security implications (what if the magic
> devfs.conf file goes missing, or is clobbered?)


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