[ Thanks to Carla
Schroder for this link. ]
“In the olden days Linux administrators had a static /dev
directory. It was inflexible and obese, containing 99% irrelevant
entries, and we liked it that way. We didn’t mind hassling with
makedev and struggling with major and minor numbers to enter the
devices we actually wanted, or manually deleting the 1,000 useless
/dev entries, because Real System Administrators love doing things
the hard way. It makes us feel close to our hardware. The best part
of the job is spending years acquiring and hoarding arcane bits of
knowledge, which are then passed on to eager, fresh-faced noobs
with the magical incantation, ‘RTFM, luser.’“Then came devfs, which attempted to replace this increasingly
arthritic system with something that was less complex, more
efficient, and which was a bit more based in reality…”
Related Story:
developerWorks:
Developing a Linux Command-line Utility(Jul 16, 2002)