Re: RFC: Don't label filesystems

[Jeremy Katz <katzj redhat com>]

On Sat, 2008-03-15 at 09:14 -0500, Eric Sandeen wrote:
> Jesse Keating wrote:
> > On Sat, 2008-03-15 at 04:28 +0000, Timothy Murphy wrote:
> >> Do you really want your disk to be known as 
> >> 550e8400-e29b-41d4-a716-446655440000 ?
> > 
> > It's more correct than "/dev/sda" which can change based on the order of
> > things plugged in, or the order of detection, and it's more unique than
> > an arbitrary label.
> 
> It's unique, but awfully hard to type if you need to mount something
> manually by that designator.
> 
> FWIW, on multi-root boxes, /1, /2, /3 (or whatever the current scheme
> is) isn't all that helpful either.  And I think (though haven't really
> investigated...) that something has been getting it wrong and making
> duplicate labels in F9.

That's the crux -- the label being done automatically isn't necessarily
really that much more helpful than the UUID.  And I don't think it's
something we want to punt to asking the user.  So we either need to 
  a) Come up with some better heuristic for the labels within the
constraints for label lengths, or
  b) give up on them

I'm leaning more towards b because a just feels like losing.  And yeah,
there does seem to be a duplicate label bug right now and I haven't
managed to get to the bottom of it yet either.

> To a a lot of users, though, seeing "root=<scary string>" might be
> confusing.  There should probably be a minimal education campaign if the
> change is made.
> 
> Hm, and think of the fstab formatting issues.  ;)

Well the plan was already to switch to using UUIDs by default where
we've used LABEL in the past and in fact, that's already committed.
This would just be not adding a label.

Jeremy