Greg A. Woods skrev:

>[ On , April 20, 2002 at 03:31:6 (+0100), Iggy Drougge wrote: ]
>> Subject: Terse device names
>>
>> Why are BSD device names so terse? It isn't very intuitive if your
>> Etherlink III is called "ep" for no particular reason, and it even leads to
>> naming conflicts. For example, "ed" is both the name for ESDI disks and a
>> network controller, IIRC. Wouldn't it be nice if devices were called
>> etherlinkiii instead of "ep" or etherexpress instead of "xi"?

>Well short driver names are easier to type, and unless you have dozens
>of different cards in many related systems it's unlikely you'll normally
>encounter so many that you'll be too easily confused once you've figured
>out what the drivers for the few you do have are called.

Well, with the cross-platform nature of NetBSD, I understand that cards of
several makes use a chip-oriented (as opposed to card-oriented) driver, but I
think renaming "le" to "lance" would add some clarity. Not as terse, but
easier.

>The documentation generally gives you enough hints to help translate the
>full name to the driver name:

>$ apropos etherlink
>ec (4) - driver for 3Com Etherlink II (3c503) ISA bus Ethernet cards
>ef (4) - 3Com EtherLink II (3c507) ISA Ethernet driver
>eg (4) - 3Com Etherlink Plus (3c505) Ethernet interface device driver
>el (4) - 3Com Etherlink (3c501) Ethernet interface device driver
>elmc (4) - 3Com EtherLink/MC (3c523) MCA Ethernet driver
>ep (4) - driver for 3Com Etherlink III Ethernet interfaces
>ex (4) - driver for 3Com Fast EtherLink XL (3c900, 3c905, 3c980) and similar
>PCI bus and cardbus Ethernet interfaces

And there we have the problem. Ec, ef, eg, el, ep, ex, that's hardly
intuitive. Easy to type, but terminals don't waste as much ink and paper
nowadays as they used to, and there are a lot more drivers and hardware than
in the BSD2 days.

--
En ligne avec Thor 2.6a.

Organization. This is BSD. Top down sums up the BSD philosophy.
Using the same analogy FreeBSD is a residential neighborhood (FRIENDLY),
NetBSD is a teutonically planned trailer park (PORTABLE), and OpenBSD is a
cellblock in a prison (SECURE).       --Dan Langille