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From: Julian Elischer <julian@ref.tfs.com>
Message-Id: <199602092025.MAA00293@ref.tfs.com>
Subject: Re: FS PATCHES: THE NEXT GENERATION
To: jkh@time.cdrom.com (Jordan K. Hubbard)
Date: Fri, 9 Feb 1996 12:25:15 -0800 (PST)
Cc: phk@critter.tfs.com, terry@lambert.org, current@freebsd.org
In-Reply-To: <20406.823877228@time.cdrom.com> from "Jordan K. Hubbard" at Feb 9, 96 06:47:08 am
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> 
> > I want to be able to define a policy for permissions in /dev, and no
> > form is more unix-like and suitable than
> > 
> > 	chmod 644 tty*
> > 	chown root.dev disk/*
> 
> Actually, when we stood around discussing this, we agreed that the
> "journaling" mechanism would have to deal with the addition of
> wildcard rules like this.  I understand the need to define permissions
> for entire classes of devices, not just single ones.
> 
> It's also not a question of smart or not smart, it's a question of
> upholding the Principle of Least Astonishment and also not opening the
> can of worms any farther than it has to be opened.  By preserving the
> old semantics, all your various shell scripts and system admin hacks
> survive and you don't have the "multiple incarnation of /dev (say for
> chroots) initialization problem" to worry about, either.

I think that the principal of least astonishment has to be balanced against
the problem of staying in the dark ages.
I think that mount_devfs should be able to look somewhere for a
configuration script regarding the filesystem it's making. however there
is NO ANSWER anywhere, for what to do about a new device that just pops up...


> 
> 					Jordan
>