quoted

- It'd be more appropriate for PCI devices to copy pci_device.name into
  device.name and get the user-friendly names from the PCI device name
  database (when available), and only fallback to those nasty strings
  when the more user-friendly names aren't available.

That is what happens with PCI devices. They're not appearing as meaningful 
names probably because CONFIG_PCI_NAMES isn't set. Whether or not that 
information belongs in the kernel is another debate. 

ERm ... it wasn't on the systems I looked at.  CONFIG_PCI_NAMES has
clearly been set, but the names were the user-unfriendly style.  And
yet I know the kernel has them accessible, since they're presented
by the USB layer and by /proc/pci.  But not in driverfs.

I now see some code (presumably yours) to set those two fields
to be identical, in pci_scan_device(), but the useful description
is instead set in pci_scan_slot().  Presumably this is a case of
various init paths in PCI not wholly agreeing with each other;
maybe pci_name_device() should set both name/description fields
instead of only the one.  (Though ... why have two copies? :)

quoted

- Likewise it'd be more appropriate for USB devices to take the
  descriptive strings from the devices, like "Philips USB Digital
  Speaker System", than "USB device 0471:0104".

Those are in the devices themselves, right? There is nothing stopping the 
USB people from doing that... ;)

Good, I was just sanity checking ... since the PCI names really
haven't worked to provide user-friendly names, and I couldn't tell
if that was intentional.  I can provide a patch for USB easily.


You didn't respond to the question about changing the identifier
from "name" to be the more appropriate "description" ... is that
because you're still thinking (it'd cost to change) or because
you like using the (IMO ambiguous) identifier "name" there?

- Dave