Re: Patch: 2.5.62 devfs shrink

[Adam J. Richter]

[e-mail] wrote:
>If you're making it not 100% compatible anyway, now is the time
>to do away with that horrible 'disc' spelling ;). 'disk' is a
>harddisk or floppy disk, 'disc' is for compact disc (try Google
>on both spellings and you'll see that the world agrees ..).
>Just do s/disc/disk/g in devfs_register().

	The names of devices are not chosen by fs/devfs/*.[ch].  They
are chosen by the client code in device drivers and elsewhere that
call call devfs.  In the case of the /dev/discs/ names, they are
chose by devfs_{create,remove}_partitions in fs/partitions/check.c,
which, from the comments, was apparently written by Linus Torvalds
and Russell King.

Tangential note:	

	For what it's worth, my preference would be to change from
/dev/discs/disc0/part1 to /dev/disk/0/part1, but I think it would
probably do more harm than good to try to coordinate such a change
with switching devfs.  If you want to try to make a change where
people will eventually have to update their systems, I think it would
probably make more sense to survey existing devfs naming practices and
try to come up with some recommendations harmonize them a bit.  For
example, should the directory names be singular or plural (/dev/loop
or /dev/loops, /dev/disk or /dev/disks)?  I would recommend signular
because it is less English-centric.  There are probably four or five
recommendations like these that could be put into a Documentation
file.  More consistent naming schemes in anything tend to make
a system more readily usable.

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