Subject: Re: CFR: The Auto-Generation Block/Character Device Switch Tables
To: None <tech-kern@netbsd.org>
From: der Mouse <mouse@Rodents.Montreal.QC.CA>
List: tech-kern
Date: 05/15/2002 21:59:27
> Although I'm the mean kind of person who'd just declare a flag day
> and everything one side would work and everything the other side
> wouldn't :-)

That's exactly what I did when switching my house ports to 16
partitions per pack.  And after seeing the horror that weaseled its way
into DISKPART on ports like i386, I'm not sorry.

Sometimes compatability just isn't worth the price.  IMO dealing with
that sort of nightmare (for all foreseeable future time!) is worse than
dealing with a flag day in /dev.  Especially since it's really not that
hard to double all the unit numbers until you get /dev rebuilt.  Double
especially since it appears that you are Not Supposed to do installs
without sysinst now, so the flag day could be hidden in sysinst.

And what happens when you decide 16 partitions isn't enough?  Slice the
minor number up in ways yet uglier?

> Then again, does it really matter if the major number for
> /dev/console is 1048219 or /dev/wd1a has a major number of 390342 ?
> So long as MAKEDEV knows what they areit shouldn't be a problem,
> right ?

And once again we see the "people shouldn't administer their systems,
they should just run our scripts and hope our idea of TRT matches what
they want" attitude.

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