I am running from memory right now. But the short version is. Al Viro has complained about the sysfs removal antics of sysfs, and I have seen Al get confused and "fix" filesystems that depart too far from normal filesystem semantics.
I have gone down this path both ways and "rm -rf" semantics are horrible and cause real bugs in the kernel at the boundaries between devices. "rm -rf" semantics are also horrible because no sanity checks can be performed. Normal "unlink/rmdir" semantics are absolutely achievable including not allowing children to be removed before their parents with just a few bug fixes to the kernel. I ran out of energy before I could track down and make those bug fixes which is why things are left in the current state. And now we don't need any more boiler plate to get there, the current primary interfaces to sysfs remember all of the filenames. The fact we actually need to allow parents to be deleted before their children today to support pci is absoltuely broken. It is a simple matter of code bugs. The device tree semantics are tree semantics not random order semantics. I will aim to take a second look when I can spend a little more time and give you more concrete reasons (other than the old NAK from Viro) about why recursive sysfs directory removal can cause real bugs. It is just subtle enough I can't remember the set of the problems in detail and a quick look at the code is not enough to remind me. But I have run into real issues with even the limited recursive remvoval that sysfs does today. Eric -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majord...@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
