On Fri, Nov 4, 2016 at 11:48 PM, Christopher Head <ch...@chead.ca> wrote: > On Thu, 27 Oct 2016 10:25:39 -0400 > Rich Freeman <ri...@gentoo.org> wrote: > >> It would be nice if standards like USB incorporated some kind of GUID. >> I ended up having to write a udev rule for a pl2303 RS232 adapter to >> tie it to a specific USB port precisely so that I could have more than >> one and know which one talked to which device. >> >> I'd argue that the udev network interface names were a better (if >> painful to transition to) solution to a problem created by somebody >> else. Being able to use wildcards in configuration files is probably >> an adequate solution for those who are using a single device. >> > > You mean like a device serial number? Which is totally part of the USB > standard, but many devices don’t bother to include one because they > would have to be serially programmed in the factory? If your device has > a serial number, you can generally see it as a udev attribute and use > it to set up meaningful persistent names for multiple > otherwise-identical devices.
++ Though stuff like this is why sometimes it makes sense to make things a required part of the standard. If the device had access to some source of randomness perhaps it could at least flash one on first powerup. Of course the only thing that would be worse than not having a unique ID would be having a unique ID that isn't unique... -- Rich
