On Wed, Dec 31, 2014 at 8:44 AM, Hendrik Boom <hendrik@???>
wrote:

> May I ask what all this complexity is supposed to accomplish?
>

Legacy support. Or retrocomputing.

More than 10 to 20 years ago we had static /dev but started to get dynamic
devices. This was seen as a HUGE problem because some competing legacy
environments (windows, etc) did things like automount magnetic disks, or
autorun an executable with certain names on optical media. And it was seen
as the end of the world if linux couldn't be made to do the same, autorun
executables as root on removable media, or auto mount floppies and such.
Personally I didn't find it very appealing.

Now a days we have dynamic /dev and static devices. I haven't mounted a
zip disk on a linux desktop in maybe 20 years, haven't used a floppy in any
way at all for maybe 15 years. Haven't used a USB flash drive in maybe
5-10 years other than at the BIOS level to boot, too easy to use the
network instead.

In the future I'd be quite happy with a static /dev to match my static
device. Its not like I'll be inserting cdroms into my old eee laptop that
has no optical drive. Or inserting floppy disks into my desktop that has
no floppy drives. I mostly do installs off the network PXEBOOT but
sometimes I need bios support to boot off a USB flash, although thats
pretty rare.

I don't think as an OS we're going to be permitted to have a static /dev
anymore. Its a funny divergence watching things get further apart over
time as device hardware gets less dynamic and the OS gets ever more dynamic.