>Do you want to scan dmesg to see which serial port your USB AVR programmer has appeared as?
If I only have to do it once it's no biggie. Do you want to have to rummage around in /dev to see which new name your DVD writer has been given today? I suspect that specific udev bug has been fixed by now, but I still don't feel confident that I can reboot a linux system and have my device nodes be the same ones they were before, even though I haven't plugged anything new into the USB ports since 2009.
>Do you really want to edit /etc/fstab to mount a flash drive?
I should've been clearer; if you set it to allow user-level mounting then FreeBSD will let one simply use the regular "mount" command with its ordinary arguments to mount a flash drive. No need for a new command with a new name.
I still don't feel confident that I can reboot a linux system and have my device nodes be the same ones they were before
I'm sorry to hear that? udev lets you match devices by their serial number, so there's no reason why device symlinks should be moving around on you unless you've written overly-general rules. (Expecting something like /dev/ttyUSB0 to point to a particular device is rather optimistic, of course, which is why you write a rule to make that /dev/avr_programmer or something.)
> (Expecting something like /dev/ttyUSB0 to point to a particular device is rather optimistic, of course, which is why you write a rule to make that /dev/avr_programmer or something.)
And then the rule format changes, or something. Point is I've never had a problem finding a device without udev; I don't generally hotplug things into my desktop. The exception would be flash drives, but the first one plugged in becomes da0, the next one becomes da1... it's never been an issue for me because my only use cases are "leave this drive plugged in all the time and mount it in fstab", in which case it has a stable device node in practice if not in theory, and "mount a friend's drive that I will most likely never connect again"... anyway. My experience is that for a system with the same set of devices plugged into it, multiple boots will reliably give each device the same /dev node on a non-udev system.
If I only have to do it once it's no biggie. Do you want to have to rummage around in /dev to see which new name your DVD writer has been given today? I suspect that specific udev bug has been fixed by now, but I still don't feel confident that I can reboot a linux system and have my device nodes be the same ones they were before, even though I haven't plugged anything new into the USB ports since 2009.
>Do you really want to edit /etc/fstab to mount a flash drive?
I should've been clearer; if you set it to allow user-level mounting then FreeBSD will let one simply use the regular "mount" command with its ordinary arguments to mount a flash drive. No need for a new command with a new name.