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Date:      Thu, 9 Oct 2003 17:21:57 +0200 (CEST)
From:      Harti Brandt <brandt@fokus.fraunhofer.de>
To:        David Gilbert <dgilbert@dclg.ca>
Cc:        ecsd <ecsd@ecsd.com>
Subject:   Re: cannot create partition entries for /dev/ad3
Message-ID:  <20031009171829.Y980@beagle.fokus.fraunhofer.de>
In-Reply-To: <16261.27258.563735.274938@canoe.dclg.ca>
References:  <3F8279C5.9070300@ecsd.com> <200310071929.30826.doconnor@gsoft.com.au> <16261.27258.563735.274938@canoe.dclg.ca>

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On Thu, 9 Oct 2003, David Gilbert wrote:

DG>>>>>> "Daniel" == Daniel O'Connor <doconnor@gsoft.com.au> writes:
DG>
DG>Daniel> The only reason most people will ever touch /dev is to either
DG>Daniel> make devices (hence no longer necessary with devfs), or change
DG>Daniel> permissions. The later is more difficult with devfs, but IMHO
DG>Daniel> the tradeoff is worthwhile.
DG>
DG>This brings me to my (small) beef with devfs.  When you invoke an
DG>abstraction, a metric of the usefulness of that abstraction is how
DG>well the abstractions metaphors map onto the target system's
DG>metaphors.
DG>
DG>So as a filesystem, devfs does will by replicating the average
DG>person's view of should be in /dev ... subject to what devices are
DG>actually found...
DG>
DG>But filesystems also have persistence.  In the trivial case, the
DG>persistence of the object (say ... a disk) preserved the filesystems
DG>node.  But if I walk into /dev and change the permissions on a node,
DG>this persists only until the next reboot.

Filesystems not necessarily have persistance. Although it would be fancy
to be able to backup and restore /proc or /portal. Many devices
(especially with all this hot-plugable stuff today) are not persistant,
why should their representation be?

harti
-- 
harti brandt,
http://www.fokus.fraunhofer.de/research/cc/cats/employees/hartmut.brandt/private
brandt@fokus.fraunhofer.de, harti@freebsd.org



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