[lsb-discuss] Inclusion of makedev() and related functions

Craig Scott craig.scott at csiro.au
Fri Dec 31 17:11:52 PST 2010


Hi all. Has there been any recent discussion around including the makedev() macro and its associated functions in LSB? Specifically, here's the things I'm talking about:

makedev(major,minor)   <-- defined as a macro in sys/stat.h
gnu_dev_makedev
gnu_dev_major
gnu_dev_minor

According to the LSB Navigator, all four of these are available in every linux distribution except for one, Debian 3.1r2 on x86. Since this particular Debian version is quite old, it would seem appropriate that the makedev macro and its three associated functions be included in the LSB.

The motivating case for me is in building CMake (I'm working with the latest release, which is 2.8.3). CMake makes use of makedev() in its archive creation code, which appears to be a genuinely valid situation where makedev is a reasonable thing for user code to want to do, even if it may require sudo or something similar to actually make use of this particular feature of CMake. If I understand the CMake code correctly, then the typicaly user probably won't need the makedev functionality unless they try to create a package that has device nodes in it. That would be a small proportion of CMake users, but CMake requires this code feature for it to be buildable. Having makedev() in the LSB would address this situation with seemingly few drawbacks given the widespread support for it already.

-- 
Dr Craig Scott
Computational Software Engineering Team Leader, CSIRO (CMIS)
Melbourne, Australia


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