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At Wed, 24 May 2006 09:47:13 -0600,
Herb Peyerl wrote:
>=20
> eggzachery... That has more than irritated me on OS X as regards to =20
> USB com devices.  All of my device programmers implement some USB Com =20
> interface.  So I have different Makefile's depending on whether I'm =20
> at home plugged into my USB hub or in some truck reflashing a =20
> controller....

I'm afraid I'm quite ignorant of USB's addressing and attachment
schemes.

In any case it seems to me that USB is inherently something that
involves user control.

I.e. one can expect USB devices to come and go at any time and therefore
there is likely some need for a device manager of some sort which can
give the user a view of what the OS sees when such devices are added,
shuffled, and removed.  This would allow the user some way to quickly
identify which device is which, even if only by unplugging and
re-connecting it again.

At the core of this issue seems to be the dichotomy between storage
media devices and most other types of devices.  There's even a small
split between devices that host removable storage media and those that
are fixed.

So Herb's issue with com ports is, I suspsect (my USB ignorance aside)
not going to be solved by anything in the filesystem world where the
volume label determines the "virtual" device name it appears under.

In fact I think it's rather pointless to even begin to try to unify the
way fixed media devices are attached in the /dev namespace vs. all those
other types of devices.

Indeed it would be my strong preference to have both "b0c0t0s0" style
naming as well as volume label naming (perhaps even with something so
simple as symlinks from the volume label name back to the fixed
bus/controller/target/slice name).  If I attach a new disk, or a
completely foreign disk, it may not have a recognizable volume name and
yet I still need to address it using a highly predictable /dev name.
Removable media devices have the same issue.  One must be able to
correctly identify them even when they contain no labeled media.

--=20
						Greg A. Woods

H:+1 416 218-0098 W:+1 416 489-5852 x122 VE3TCP RoboHack <woods@robohack.ca>
Planix, Inc. <woods@planix.com>       Secrets of the Weird <woods@weird.com>

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