[ On Tue, November 24, 1998 at 18:46:49 (-0500), Michael Richardson wrote: ]
> Subject: PR 4094
>
>   I had suggested last year that our conf.c should be more friendly to 
> people doing custom work that might not make it back into the distribution
> soon (or ever...)
> 
>   We've had discussions about the problems of allocating major device numbers
> for projects that either aren't in the tree yet, or will never be, or are
> just for experimentation. 
>   I don't have a full solution, but PR 4094 was one suggestion.

PR 4094 is a quick hack that makes it possible for custom driver hacks
to avoid clashes with ongoing updates in the main tree.  It would have
saved me some merging and re-making of /dev nodes.  I don't think it's
anywhere near to being a general solution to the problem of allocating
and assigning device numbers though.

Having recently written a driver for FreeBSD-2.2.x and then ported it to
NetBSD-current I've had the opportunity to think long and hard about
this issue (well, actually I've been thinking of it long and hard ever
since the days when I wrote drivers for Xenix and then AT&T Unix!).

IMO FreeBSD gets a million miles closer to a complete solution and is
really only missing a wee tiny bit of glue (and an as yet unspecified
solution to the issue of building in "sparse" source trees).  A complete
solution must put all the allocation/assignment policy in *one* place
(just like that little cleanup sweep that was onde some time ago to try
and get all the version identification information into one place).
Even the MAKEDEV script (or some data table it sources) should be
generated using this single source of information.

Also, so far as I can see the FreeBSD DEVFS implementation requires the
somewhat more elegant approach they've taken, which seems to imply that
if NetBSD is to ever sport a feature like DEVFS then it needs to do
something similar anyway....

(Of course since I've not looked at FreeBSD's DDI/DKI in several months,
it may all be different now!  ;-)

-- 
							Greg A. Woods

+1 416 218-0098      VE3TCP      <gwoods@acm.org>      <robohack!woods>
Planix, Inc. <woods@planix.com>; Secrets of the Weird <woods@weird.com>