Messages in this thread | | | Date | Tue, 14 Feb 2006 10:20:30 +0100 | From | Martin Mares <> | Subject | Re: CD writing in future Linux (stirring up a hornets' nest) |
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Hello!
> This claim is a bit surprising since only, but the most irrelevant > stuff from the dust bin of history, doesn't define a world global > unique id those days.
That's unfortunately not true -- many USB devices don't have a usable serial number.
Also, if I have a single device of its kind, let's say a USB mouse, I really want to call it "The Mouse" and I don't want to reconfigure anything if I plug it to a different port or replace it with a slightly different mouse. All mice are considered equivalent by the user as there is no reason to distinguish between them.
The same applies to CD burners -- as long as I have only one (which is still the most common situation), I shouldn't have to think about how to call it. Let it be just /dev/cdrw.
When I get multiple such devices, things start getting interesting, but there is no single naming strategy which fits all uses. For example, if I have two USB ports into which I connect USB disks various people bring to me, it's convenient to call them "left" and "right", because the serial number doesn't mean anything to me if I haven't seen the device before. On the other hand, if I connect my own drives, it makes sense to call them by their serial numbers or something like that.
I think that it's clear from all this, that device naming is a matter of policy and that the best the OS can do is to give the users a way how to specify their policy, which is what udev does.
Have a nice fortnight -- Martin `MJ' Mares <mj@ucw.cz> http://atrey.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~mj/ Faculty of Math and Physics, Charles University, Prague, Czech Rep., Earth P.C.M.C.I.A. stands for `People Can't Memorize Computer Industry Acronyms' - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
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