interesting article, for all those who think Ubuntu is already easy

[Scott James Remnant]

On Wed, 2006-05-31 at 11:06 -0300, Derek Broughton wrote:

> We've agreed time after time that we _don't_ care about the dev names!  I
> realize that I've been laboring under a misapprehension
> 
Then what are you talking about?

Symlinks are still "dev names" in my opinion.  You should not care about
them.  Use HAL or /sys to locate the device you want, and translate that
into the current name under /dev for this session.

Access to device nodes is something that only console power users care
about, it is absolutely not something that should be exposed under the
graphical UI.  Certainly not as a window that pops up every time a
device is inserted.

If somebody is a power user enough to want to know a device node
filename, then they are perfectly capable of writing their own udev
rules to name it ... they are config files, after all.

> > icons and selections for the users, named appropriately (e.g. "NEC
> > DVD-ROM") etc.
> 
> They're _not_ always named appropriately.  You still haven't explained how
> to differentiate between two memory sticks, or iPods, etc.  Alan's
> suggestion of having the "OS" ask is reasonable - whether that's at the
> desktop or udev level.
> 
No, it's completely unreasonable, see above.

And your argument here is flawed.  If the system can differentiate
between two memory sticks, or two iPods, then it is able to produce
different "friendly names" for the desktop for them.

Memory sticks have vendor, device, serial number and volume labels to be
used; not to mention the size.

If the system *cannot* differentiate them, then there's no way to
generate persistent device names or symlinks _anyway_, so the problem is
moot.

> > btw, incidentally, the /dev/pilot thing doesn't work most of the time --
> > it links to ttyUSB0 when it should link to ttyUSB1, and there's no way
> > to do that with udev
> 
> A slight modification of the rule to ignore all the even device numbers
> would work: 
> KERNEL=="ttyUSB[13579]", SYSFS{product}=="Palm Handheld*", \
>                                         SYMLINK+="pilot"
> (the device assigns two consecutive tty devices, but the odd one is always
> the one you want pilot-link to use).  In any case, I mentioned it only
> because you and Matt both said udev doesn't do this, when it clearly does.  
> 
And what if you have a USB serial port as ttyUSB0?  The pilot gets
ttyUSB1 and ttyUSB2 and thus breaks your rule.

Scott
-- 
Have you ever, ever felt like this?
Had strange things happen?  Are you going round the twist?
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