Re: RFC: Don't label filesystems

[Eric Sandeen <sandeen redhat com>]

John Summerfield wrote:
> Jesse Keating wrote:
>> On Sat, 2008-03-15 at 11:21 -0400, G.Wolfe Woodbury wrote:
>>> But it's not "user friendly" in that it has no meaning that the user can
>>> associate to the contents.
>> Thinking that "/dev/sda1" or "LABEL=/root" has any real meaning is just
>> false anyway.  It sometimes works, just by happy accident.  But if
>> you're mixing machines or cloning things it'll go wrong.
> 
> It used to be that /dev/hda1 and /dev/sda1 had defined meanings. IMV 
> moving away from that was a mistake.

I really don't think that was ever true.  If it stopped being true it
was because more interesting hardware appeared, not so much a coding
decision.

assuming that there is one fixed drive in the system which will always
be found first is a mistake, IMHO.

> I recall some discussion years ago regarding larger SCSI devices, about 
> problems recognising drives.
> 
> The use of UUIDs might help there, but I don't see any merit in 
> inflicting that solution on the 90%+ users who don't have it. Enterprise 
> people might have the technical background to adjust to it, but almost 
> nobody on (eg) fedora-list does.
> 
> We who generally can attach four disks (USB, firewire aside) don't have 
> a problem knowing which drive is which: it's it is _the_ drive, or we 
> plugged in another and know which is which, or we can pop the top off 
> and have a look.

no... 4 disks?  that's a very limited worldview.  :)

-Eric