has anyone installed 5.1 from a SCSI CD?

[Peter Jeremy]

On Sun, Sep 28, 2003 at 06:14:25PM -0400, Sergey Babkin wrote:
>BTW, I have another related issue too: since at least 4.7
>all the disk device nodes have charcater device entries in /dev.

As of December 1999 - which is before 4.0-RELEASE.  This was well
advertised and discussed at the time.  Your objections are about
4 years too late.

>That's very, very wrong. Even though there may be no difference
>any more between the charcater and block drivers, the type of
>device node still conveys the information about device types
>to the applications. One case in point being a viewer application
>(if anyone is interested, http://nac.sf.net ) which must handle
>the sequential and random-access devices differently:

'block' vs 'character' has nothing to do with random or sequential
access and any application that thinks it does is broken.  Any
application that directly accesses devices must understand all the
various quirks - ability to seek, block size(s) supported, side-
effects of operations etc.  Yes, block devices must be random access,
but character devices can be either random or sequential-only
depending on the physical device.

The only purpose for block devices was to provide a cache for disk
devices.  It makes far more sense for this caching to be tightly
coupled into the filesystem code where the cache characteristics
can be better controlled.

Peter