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From: Kyle Moffett <mrmacman_g4@mac.com>
Subject: Re: CD writing in future Linux (stirring up a hornets' nest)
Date: Mon, 30 Jan 2006 21:04:37 -0500
To: Bill Davidsen <davidsen@tmr.com>
Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org
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On Jan 30, 2006, at 17:52, Bill Davidsen wrote:
> What is not easily available in Linux is a nice single place to  
> find out what mass storage (disk/optical/floppy/ZIP/LS120/tape)  
> devices are on the system, and what the system calls them.

Yes it is available, and a whole slew of GUI applications use it.   
It's called "hal", or Hardware Abstraction Layer, and it has small  
hooks into udev and a bit of sysfs code so that it has a list of all  
devices of various types and knows what their associated udev-created  
device nodes are.  This means that I can configure udev to put my CD  
drive on /dev/burner and correctly written GUI programs will just  
find it and work.

> Because for low tech users udev is the problem, not the solution.  
> The user doesn't want to tell the system what to call the device,  
> he wants to see what's there, and that includes serial numbers of  
> drives (where available) because if a user has several drives it's  
> likely that they are identical.

Your average low-tech user installing stock Debian (Not even  
something targeted at user-friendliness like Ubuntu), will end up  
with udev/hal installed.  When he plugs in his burner, it will get  
the name /dev/cdrom[0-9] behind the scenes, and hal will notice.   
When he starts up k3b, it will use hal and automatically notice his  
drive, showing him brand, serial number, etc.

> Instead of having the user tell the system what to call a device,  
> let the system tell the user what it is called.

Uhh, both happen.  The system tells userspace "I just got/have a  
device with brand 'foo', specs 'bar', serial 'baz', etc".  Userspace  
(behind the scenes, without your low-tech user caring) creates a  
device node "/dev/cdrom[0-9]" and alerts hal, which sends it to your  
application, which nicely alerts the user.  As an admin who does a  
lot on the command line, I can tie certain drive serial numbers to / 
dev/blue_burner and /dev/red_burner for my own ease-of-command-line- 
use without breaking the aforementioned hal system.

Cheers,
Kyle Moffett

--
I have yet to see any problem, however complicated, which, when you  
looked at it in the right way, did not become still more complicated.
   -- Poul Anderson


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