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 <[email protected]> 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 [email protected]
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
[Index of Archives]
[Kernel Newbies]
[Netfilter]
[Bugtraq]
[Photo]
[Stuff]
[Gimp]
[Yosemite News]
[MIPS Linux]
[ARM Linux]
[Linux Security]
[Linux RAID]
[Video 4 Linux]
[Linux for the blind]
[Linux Resources]
