On Mon, Sep 06, 2004 at 01:58:53PM -0500, Chapman Flack wrote:
> I saw a lot of good devfs ideas in the mail archives, but can't tell if
> there's current activity.  There seems to be an empty CVS directory for
> it in miscfs.  The ideas that seemed best to me involved some
> config syntax to specify initial naming/ownership/mode defaults, with an
> on-disk db the kernel updates if the user changes those attributes after
> boot.

I've not seen any activity - apart from one day when I copied kernfs into
a directory tree called devfs.  I've since deleted it!

> It would be so much tidier than the MFS MAKEDEV magic, and I really like
> the idea of seeing only the devices it makes sense to see.

There are other tricks, like auto creating entries for clone drivers
(eg pty)

> Btw (I see it's been mentioned before in the archives) if it's still
> MFS MAKEDEV we're stuck with for a while, it fails if there are not
> (static) chown and chgrp in /bin or /sbin.

MAKEDEV should work these days, it uses the -o and -g options to mknod.

> Btw^2, is there anything
> wrong with having dynamic binaries and having a /lib for 'essential
> shared libraries' as they say in the HFS standard?

libc is in /lib, the 'problem' is that some programs are in /usr.
The actual fix is to realise that disks are big enough to allow all of /usr
(which is basically readonly as it no longer contains user files) to be
in the root filsystem.  However some people insist on it being otherwise...

	David

-- 
David Laight: david@l8s.co.uk