Re: FreeBSD devfs support on NetBSD 5.0

[Matthew Mondor <mm_lists%pulsar-zone.net@localhost>]

On Sat, 20 Jun 2009 07:38:22 -0400 (EDT)
der Mouse <mouse%Rodents-Montreal.ORG@localhost> wrote:

> > And finally, I'm still not entirely clear on what the benefit of a
> > devfs is supposed to be.  [...]
> 
> I entirely agree with you here.  I see devfs as a solution looking for
> a problem.

I can also relate here, as I've never needed a devfs myself.  On the
other hand, while also using NetBSD for "desktop" workstations
(although much more for servers and gateways), my conception of a
desktop is pretty different than what people now expect of Windows or
Ubuntu and I don't rely on a thousand hacks to manage my systems for
me, yet.

On the Debian systems I admin, devfs is not in use, although
available.  Early tests using it showed that too much software needed
to be adapted to use the new device names as it seemed that the Linux
implementation didn't preserve compatibility names, at least back
then.  Since various distributions could have named static device nodes
differently, this was probably a difficult issue to solve for the devfs
implementers...  If they provide a rules configuration file to allow
such aliases (I didn't check how the implementation works at all), then
possibly it was Debian's fault, however.
-- 
Matt