On Thu, 16 May 2002, David Laight wrote:

> On Thu, May 16, 2002 at 11:11:44PM +1000, Darren Reed wrote:
> > In some email I received from der Mouse, sie wrote:
> >
> > Tell me, do you care what inode number /etc/passwd has ?  Or /root ?
> > What difference does it make if the major number for a device is X or Y ?
>
> The difficulty is that if you change any of the major numbers you
> can't boot an old kernel.  This makes the upgrade somewhat tricky
> - especially for the developers who definitely won't get it right
> first time :-(

You also, more importantly, can't boot a new kernel on an old file system.

Take care,

Bill