The following reply was made to PR bin/19865; it has been noted by GNATS.

From: Erik Berls <cyber@netbsd.org>
To: gnats-bugs@NetBSD.org
Cc: netbsd-bugs@netbsd.org
Subject: Re: bin/19865: MAKEDEV belongs in /sbin/
Date: Sat, 7 Oct 2006 19:32:01 +0000

 On Sat, Oct 07, 2006 at 06:42:41PM +0000, Erik Berls wrote:
 ] 
 ] MAKEDEV contains elements that are not shareable across machine
 ] arch (CPUs), thus is not a candidate for /sbin/.
 ] 
 ] While moving MAKEDEV out of /dev/ is ideal, it will have to wait
 ] until major/minor devices are unitified, or until devfs is integrated.
 ] 
 ] Note that currently an under-populated /dev (missing /dev/console)
 ] will trigger the system to mount a MFS and populated with the
 ] /dev/MAKEDEV.  This should take care of the specific case in the PR.
 
 To further clarify, we eventually want base.tgz to work on any
 machine within a cpuarch.
 
 Thus the same bits must work on all systems that contain the same
 cpu/endian/page size tuple.  MAKEDEV is greatly divergent from
 this.
 
 Currently, every port has different device node allocations that
 heavily conflict.
 
 e.g.:
 next68k and mac68k differ on the location of systrace
 
 next68k:
 device-major    systrace        char 47                 systrace
 
 mac68k:
 device-major    systrace        char 50                 systrace