Subject: Re: xmms patch for raw cds
To: Simon Burge <simonb@wasabisystems.com>
From: Frederick Bruckman <fredb@immanent.net>
List: tech-pkg
Date: 02/10/2003 22:31:21
On Tue, 11 Feb 2003, Simon Burge wrote:

> "Perry E. Metzger" wrote:
>
> > Frederick Bruckman <fredb@immanent.net> writes:
> > > > I see one problem: what if the cd-rom drive one wishes to play
> > > > audio from isn't cd0?
> >
> > Then they can configure that.
>
> In case it wasn't clear in my original message, all that change provides
> is (what I think are) saner defaults.  Even if /dev/cd0c is wrong
> because the user had a second CD ROM they prefer to listen to audio CDs
> on, it's still a better default than /vol/dev/aliases/cdrom0.

True, "/vol/dev/aliases/cdrom0" is clearly for somebody else (Sun?),
but "/dev/cd0c" doesn't work on i386. It looks like "/dev/cd0a" would
work on NetBSD on all platforms.

Note that that doesn't work for mplayer, as mplayer utilizes
cdda_identify_scsi(), which requires an additional argument of the
raw partition. They used to have a mess of defines as xmms does, but
currently the device defaults to "/dev/cdrom" on everything but SUN
and WIN32 (overridable in a config file, or on the command line).

> > > Yeah. For that reason, I think it would better to use /dev/cdrom on
> > > all platforms, and on NetBSD, to let the user make /dev/cdrom a
> > > symlink to the desired device.
> >
> > I think we should make things work well by default. As it stands right
> > now, most users will be happy with cd0 being used to play things, and
> > I think in general we should do what Simon proposes. Rule of least
> > surprise. The user is NOT expecting to need to create a /dev/cdrom and
> > /dev/cdrom goes very much against the NetBSD grain I think.
>
> I agree with this, having to create extra symlinks in /dev to make software
> work isn't a good thing (IMHO).

You mean like "/dev/audio", and "/dev/bktr"? I haven't heard any
complaints about them, especially as you can easily specify the device
that would be the target of the symlink directly, if you want to.

Frederick