links and lox, more of the same

[utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!unix-wizards]

>From RAM at MIT-MC Tue Aug 18 20:08:15 1981

"like remembering to put something in /etc/rc"

I am on the side of those who say such solutions are tolerable, but
there is another trap, namely remembering to take them out.  /etc/ttys
is another such instance, perhaps more rigidly embedded in unix than
"tricks" in rc. In particular on more than one occasion (alas too far
separated in time to have had immediate recall of the solution!) I have
taken  a tty driver out of a kernel but neglected to remove the special
files and worse, the /etc/ttys entries, so that nothing bad shows up when
I come up single user, because nothing touches  the devices (or rather
non-devices), but when init starts reading /etc/ttys my system disk goes
bananas and it is hard to get even logged in, let alone shoot down init ...

In summary, table driven software is fine as long as the tables are correct.
But it can be annoying to make it robust.
--bob morris