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

[Derek Broughton]

Scott James Remnant wrote:

> On Thu, 2006-05-25 at 13:44 +0200, Alan McKinnon wrote:
> 
>> udev is under heavy development and things are changing fast - it's
>> now at the stage where hotplug can be dispensed with. But you still
>> need to edit /etc/udev/rules.d/50-udev.rules by hand. The day will
>> come soon when the OS will respond to a udev event by popping up a
>> dialogue saying "This is a new drive you have never used on this
>> machine before. What would you like to call it in future?" It's just
>> not really for that yet.
>> 
> No it won't, because nobody cares what the device node of a drive is
> called.

Not the device node - you're right that we don't care about that - but what
you're going to see it called on your desktop.

> The day has already come and gone where all CD drives appear in the
> Computer window, named according to their capabilities (I see
> "CD-RW/DVD-ROM" and "CD-RW/DVD±R") ...
> 
> CDs inserted into the drives cause the icon to change to the icon and
> description of the CD inserted; and the contents of the CD is
> automatically made available on the filesystem.

And in that case it _is_ using the disk labels, but consider the case of
using one PC to synchronize to Palms or iPods...  We'd like to have each
one always be recognizable.
> 
> The "naming of the device node in /dev" is entirely irrelevant to
> anybody with a UI.  For those people without UI, they can use udev TODAY
> to assign a persistent name to that device; dapper ships with this
> already -- e.g. I can use /dev/disk/by-id/ata-LITE-ON-COMBO* to access
> the CD-RW/DVD-ROM etc.

Apparently not.  /dev/disk/by-id/ only contains my HD partitions, not my
CD/DVD.

> It's not that Linux isn't ready for it, we're ready already, it's just
> that it's the WRONG THING and we're already heading down a much better
> path.

Yes and No :-)  When you have multiple devices that appear similar (eg,
block devices with identical file system types on USB) then you need to
have a way for the _user_ to identify them.  It's almost all there in
kubuntu - if I connect a usb storage device, it'll show up in /media (and
possibly on my desktop).  If it has a label, it will use the label as the
icon name.  I'm not sure how it chooses names otherwise, but I can give it
any name I want just by renaming it - next time I connect it, it will use
the name I set.
-- 
derek