> Anyone who has more than four disks on a box is probably not Joe Average,
> and can thus be reasonably expected to be able to MAKEDEV all he needs.

If you put aside arguments like "it has always been that way" and
"sysadmins should adopt to the system", I can really only think of
three alternatives that make sense. Here are the three alternatives
and why they make sense:

1. In dev, you find all devices you can possibly connect to the system
   - that way /dev would never change

2. In dev, you find all devices the current kernel supports
   - that way you could see what devices are supported by that system

3. In dev, you find all devices currently probed in the system
   - that way you could see what devices actually are active

These three alternatives all have their pros and cons, both from the
implementation and the conceptional side.

Todays implementation, where the reason that you find a device in dev
is that some person at some instance created that device on some system
in the asumption that it fits 90% of the systems out there and the rest
better use MAKEDEV may be an easy one to implement but I really can not
see any arguments for the concept in itself. As it is one that without
much effort works most of the time, it might be tolerated anyway.

As this is not specific to port-sparc this should be moved to
tech-religion (if such a thing would exist). So I blame the
posting here fully on the lack of such a list ;-)

Harald.