A FC6 suggestion.

[Jeff Vian]

On Fri, 2006-05-05 at 15:34 -0500, Aaron Konstam wrote:
> On Fri, 2006-05-05 at 14:56 -0400, Mauriat Miranda wrote:
> > On 5/5/06, Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > > I question if this necessary. You can have entries in fstab with or
> > > > without labels. I've had 3 single Fedora installations on single drive
> > > > across multiple partitions and never have run into a problem in the
> > > > installer or usage nor have I had to manually edit fstab for this. I
> > > > think in Anaconda the labels will start shifting to /1, /2, /home1
> > > > etc. Since at runtime you don't deal with partition labels, just their
> > > > mount points, it really is not a serious concern.
> > >
> > > Assume you are in the IT dept for some group and you are used
> > > to being able to re-use disks in different machines and to
> > > recover data from any disk by installing/mounting in any working
> > > machine.  Now you find that any combination of disks from
> > > default fedora/RH/Centos installs won't boot...  It is a
> > > problem.
> > 
> > So you boot with a LiveCD or some Rescue disk/media and fix it - use
> > the device ID or relabel it. Isn't that the way to fix it? I don't
> > understand the problem. Your assumed scenario is too vague.
> > 
> > -Mauriat
> We are tying to produce a distribution, are we not, that the uninitiated
> can install and it will just work. A lot of things can be fixed but we
> want to avoid that.

The uninitiated will not likely be moving drives between machines.  They
would do an install on already existing drives and as such the Fedora
install/labeling scheme works well.  The conflicts occur when previously
labeled drives are mixed in a machine as mentioned above.

I agree that it needs to be more capable of recovering but the problem
conditions do not appear to be with the new/uninitiated but rather with
the users who are moving hardware between machines after the
installation has completed for whatever reason. 

Some OSes write a PVID on the physical device that is unique (similar to
the way identifiers on LVM logical volumes and volume groups are
unique).  This may be a better way since a unique identifier of this
sort (physical volume plus logical volume/partition) is guaranteed to
not conflict the way the current labels do.