Re: Warning, cua2 opened, ...

Gert Doering (gert@greenie.muc.de)
Sun, 15 Mar 1998 18:20:36 +0100 (MET)

>> P.S. Paul Gortmaker's patches to display more information about which
>> programs were using the /dev/cuaXX devices is a Good Thing. I should
>> have thought of doing that, but I didn't.

>Would it be disasterous to change their major number to be the same, or
>convince the distribution maintainers to make cua -> tty?

Yes. Please remember that device locking is done in user land, by files
named "LCK..ttyS*". If you have multiple names for the same device,
programs won't notice that "ttyS0" is already in use, if someone else has
"cua0" locked via the "LCK..cua0" lock file.

This is *exactly* what got us into this mess - we have to get rid of the
stupid idea of having multiple names for the very same device *FAST*.

It's a support nightmare (I'm the "a getty maintainer" Tytso mentioned who
wanted cua* support dropped ASAP).

I think Ted's idea is very good. We have to really hammer into people
that cua* devices are deprecated, and that only works if you flood them
with warning messages all over (I have been *telling* everybody this for
years, but this wasn't enough).

gert

-- 
email: gert@greenie.muc.de   fax: +49-89-3244814   http://www.leo.org/~doering


Lawrence Radiation Laboratory keeps all its data in an old gray trunk.


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