OCD programmers and backwards compatibility :-).

[Les Mikesell]

Alan wrote:
>> How do you make that happen as the devices are autodetected?  I'd much 
>> prefer
>> to have things identified by controller/drive/lun where applicable than 
>> to have
>> everything jump around when a new device appears and happens to be
>> detected first.
>>     
>
> That is all handled by udev on a current Fedora distribution. Older
> systems keep a /dev on disk and the mapping is up to the user. Newer
> systems its dynamic because hardware is more dynamic nowdays.
>
>   
Is it documented somewhere how to make this use sysvr4/solaris style names
for scsi devices?   I can understand  why  something like USB/firewire  
drives
might need  dynamic names , but I don't see why anyone would want throw
things that need dynamic names into the same pool with things that don't.
Why not just call all your devices device01, device02, etc. whether it's a
disk or not if you don't care about being able to associate something 
physical
with any particular one?

>> In other words they didn't care how much of how many people's time they 
>> wasted.  
>>     
>
> It would move anyway to /usr/X11R7. So why not fix the historic oddity
> that X lives in its own space which makes it messy to share over NFS and
> friends.
>   
The real names and locations don't matter as long as the distro includes 
the symlinks for
backwards compatibility.  I've forgotten how this was handled in the 
R5->R6 switch but
I thought old things continued to work (maybe it was possible to have 
copies of both
versions installed) .  In the RH/fedora mindset, I'd expect this to be a 
separate 'compatibility'
RPM containing the whole R6 if the new version isn't backwards 
compatible and symlinks if
it is.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com