Rampaging Software Installation

[Peter Jaspers-Fayer]

You beat me to it, Andrew.  I was in the midst of composing a similar
query/complaint (being less experienced, I was expressing it more along
the lines of "Hey, what did we do wrong?"), when I spotted your mail.

We too had our non-standard /dev/dsk/ipi0d0s[n] devices removed.
As one of these (with associated link) were to describe our /usr
filesystem (on a non-boot/root disk), the results were somewhat
spectacular.   We too didn't like it!

We spent some time discussing how this could best be circumvented
in the future and came up with a work-around and a better solution:

1) The work around is that install should have make it clearer that
   it was monkeying around with our devices and allowed us to fix
   up the damage before booting.  But if there are a lot of them
   (even 4 is a lot: mknod, chmod, ln, then to /dev/rdsk and do it
   all over again) it's a pain, so I would like to propose:

2) MKDEV should call a MKDEV.local, which could describe locally
   defined devices, their protection/ownership flags, and associated
   links.  This file should, of course be never be over-written!
   (as MKDEV was during the install)

   The documentation for MKDEV and mknod should be changed to warn
   people that unless changes to /dev are coded in MKDEV.local, a
   future install may mess you up.

/PJ                                                SofPJF at VM.UoGuelph.Ca
(Probably also reachable (until ?) at             SOFPJF at UOGUELPH.BITNET)
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