Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!rutgers!sri-spam!ames!ucbcad!ucbvax!hoser.berkeley.edu!bryce
From: bryce@hoser.berkeley.edu (Bryce Nesbitt)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Serial port expansion
Message-ID: <22548@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU>
Date: 12 Jan 88 19:36:15 GMT
References: <197@imagine.PAWL.RPI.EDU> <4918@well.UUCP> <2179@umd5.umd.edu> <204@imagine.PAWL.RPI.EDU>
Sender: usenet@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Reply-To: bryce@hoser.berkeley.edu (Bryce Nesbitt)
Organization: The Logic Foundation
Lines: 59


Usually I agree with Mr. Jesup.  This time he forgot to do his research:


In article <204@imagine.PAWL.RPI.EDU> beowulf!lunge!jesup@steinmetz.UUCP writes:
>
>	As I have said before, these higher unit numbers have no meaning
>to the user, especially if you have multiple serial port expansions.

As I have said before.  Unit numbers have a lots of meaning.  How else
to I find the proper place to plug a cable?

>>The neat thing 'bout this solution is that the drivers for units 1-n don't
>>have to be resident in memory until/unless they are used.
>
>This is what my mapper is doing.  Using the mapper, you also don't
								     ^^^^^
>have to load any drivers until needed.  Also, you can do it without having
>to have a 'mountlist-type' config file around, all the user needs to do
>is to drag an icon over into his expansion drawer.
				  ^^^^^^^^^
Whoha!! As I pleaded last time, READ THE FILE "DRIVERS.DOC" from the
autodocs disk.  It is also in the A500/A2000 Technical reference guide.
I'd post it here, but I don't own the rights to it.

It is impossible to "drag an icon over into his expansion drawer" and
meet the goals you have set out in the past.  The stuff in the expansion
drawer WILL be loaded from the start.

Perhaphs we need a better Autoconfig spec... I don't really like the
requirement that Expansion drawer devices are always loaded.  I'd
prefer if the icon said "I'm truckduck.device units 1-9, load me
when needed".  But it is NOT what we have now.

The split between "added" devices in the Expansion drawer and "normal"
devices in DEVS: is also disturbing.


>>I believe that this symbolic naming should be done at a higher level where
>>I can ignore it, and not have to pay the extra overhead to fool with it.
>
>	As I said, the overhead can be made almost nil...

I don't like the idea of a separate "mapper.device" for several reasons.
One of them on the grounds of asthetics; ANOTHER different type of
device name abstraction?  If a mapperish thing is used, it ought to
be system wide, and user tranparent.

DOS name abstraction has some advantages, but what blows that for me
is the possibility of a user calling a disk "SER2".  Arbitrary,
unexplained tricks like that are NOT NICE to pull on the user.


	Is someone maintaining a coss-link to BIX on this topic?

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