Owen Taylor (otaylor@redhat.com) said:
The value of it on the case of the writable root filesystem is that you only have one path for how the system works, not two. Changes to device naming only have to be put into one place. Eventually we can simple drop the dev package and it's 18,000 files.
The issue here is that it's not *that* simple, once you start handling all the devices that aren't in sysfs. Moreover, it breaks the 'load module on device access' model.
Going to a fully dynamic /dev is a paradigm shift, even if you keep the same device naming model.
There's a lot of other components of our system which are absurdly over-configurable in ways that would badly break the system - the X init scripts, the init scripts, gdm, etc, etc. Isn't turning over-configurability into a working system one of the main OS-assembly tasks?
Yes, but the raison d'etre of the initscripts or gdm aren't really 'infinite configurability to whatever policy you want'. Yet it's a design goal of udev, or at least, it appears to be.
Bill