Re: [gentoo-user] Re: *dev-less gentoo

Alec McKinnon:
> On 19/01/2016 18:51, karl@××××××××.se wrote:
...
> > I have had no pain useing an old plain /dev. What's the pain ?
> take a machine running a desktop. Plug in a usb printer. Where's your node?

To find that out I'd investigate /sys/bus/usb, either directly or via 
usb-devices or some other program. I guess "some other program" is
probably udev or similar for you, it might not be for me.

If it is a usb disk, I just look at the output of sg_map -x -i, and then
decide what to do.

> That's the whole point of a dynamic dev manager, it responds to devices
> changes that occur on normal modern machines and does TheRightThing(tm)
> - currently defined as whatever the dev-manager config tells it to do.

Ok, I don't have any usb printer, all my printers are network connected 
and do handle postscript and lpd.

And my "dev-manager" tells the system to do nothing till the owner of 
the system tells it to do so, which is the right thing for me.
The right thing might be something else for you.

> I'm having a hard time thinking what kind of machine you have in this
> day and age that can do mail and also does not need a dynamic device
> maanger. Please enlighten us, or are you perhaps using MAKEDEV?

Please be aware of that I'm not impling anything about anyone else than 
me och don't ridicule me.

To do mail, all you have to have is a network connection, a mail 
program and a mail server to relay through. All of that has been done 
for ages without any program like udev. So I don't understand why you 
have any problem understanding how that is done, or why you choose such
an example.

And I don't use MAKEDEV, the dev-nodes are already there, there is no
need to create them again. What's the fuss ?

...
> Sounds like you made one mistake once and that has now become the world
> for you. Almost no-one else here has reported dynamic dev managers make
> "everything just stop working". What you will hear is lots of whinging
> about udev - actually it's whinging about udev's maintainers cleverly
> disguised as whinging about the software - but as a class of software
> they all get the job done and do it well.

No, I did not do the mistake, the upgrade program or the udev 
installer did. And since udev (or something related to it) mounts
something on /dev, which makes it in practice inpossible to unmount.
So if udev do not fill up the new fs correctly, the system is hosed,
yea, unless I value running mknod by hand and from memory.
That very problem I had is probably fixed by now. But I don't see the
need to get exposed to it again. If udev had used e.g. /udev and
populated that dir seperately from /dev, I would not have that special
problem. udev seems to be hardcoded to /dev, but other similar program
are more malleable in this regard, and if need arises I wouldn't 
hesitate to test them.

Regards,
/Karl Hammar

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