On Wed, Jul 06, 2016 at 11:34:37AM +0200, Linus Walleij wrote:

On Tue, Jul 5, 2016 at 8:04 PM, Uwe Kleine-K?nig
[off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

[Rob]:

quoted

quoted

Like SPI and I2C, I'm against further abuse of aliases for this purpose
[1].

So what about the usecase for serial ports, where we use this
to make sure the console come out where we want it? Is that
also considered abuse or legitimate use? Note: I'm not trying to be
snarky, I'm trying to understand what is the right and wrong use
of alias. I'm confused about it right now :(

I guess it comes down to how ingrained the usage of any numbering is. 
For consoles, it was pretty important to maintain numbering and no 
alternative. But now with stdout-path that is less important. Perhaps if 
you have inittab with tty devices, then it is still needed.

So I guess I would summarize the requirement to be only cases needing to 
maintain numbering for existing userspace. The only users really caring 
about this have been on N900.

Rob