At 2:58 PM -0700 7/27/01, Bill Studenmund wrote:

:)It'd be fine for the kernel to print out major & minor numbers - those are
:)its domain.

Even that would be a big help.  Not being a kernel hacker, I really did
have no idea where to look for my pcmcia modem.  With just the major/minor
numbers, I could put a FAQ entry saying how to grep dmesg for those
numbers, then ls /dev to find the corresponding entry.

Of course, a program to do that automatically would be even better ;)

:)> What I'd expect to see would be something like 'com0 is 30/10, com1
:)> is 31/0' at which point you would establish the 'symbolic' name
:)> from mknod.
:)>
:)> Or are we working at a whole different level?
:)
:)In the past we've just assumed the sys admin is familiar enough with the
:)OS to know what is happening.

We can't keep that up, not if we want to keep attracting curious MacOS X
users.  The current situation requres the user to download kernel source,
know where com0 has attached, look through that source file, then look up
the /dev symbolic name.

Thanks,
  -- MW