>I'd hate to see the Solaris method rear its ugly head here; what would be
>_really_ _cool_ is if MAKEDEV could, given an 'autoconf' arg or something,
>take a look at the extant hardware and config and trim /dev down to match
>the configured list, or at least print messages about 'WARNING: extraneous
>device %s'.  Such as detecting that only 16 ptys were configured, but
>128 existed.
>A symlink farm would be an evil thing.

Why not a read-only devfs that dynamically created/allocated device
entries, with a normal filesystem that allowed any kind of creating
and/or writing (along with the immutable characteristics, for example)
simply union-mounted on top?

You then have 1) the dynamic devfs, 2) the ability to add
customizations, and 3) no symlinks.

Forgive me if I'm being naive.

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  Michael L. VanLoon                           michaelv@MindBender.serv.net
        --<  Free your mind and your machine -- NetBSD free un*x  >--
    NetBSD working ports: 386+PC, Mac 68k, Amiga, Atari 68k, HP300, Sun3,
        Sun4/4c/4m, DEC MIPS, DEC Alpha, PC532, VAX, MVME68k, arm32...
    NetBSD ports in progress: PICA, others...
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