A curse on LABEL=

[Tom 'Needs A Hat' Mitchell]

On Sat, Apr 10, 2004 at 02:57:40PM -0700, Bryan O'Sullivan wrote:
> On Sat, 2004-04-10 at 05:10, Timothy Murphy wrote:
> 
> > > Try adding a new SCSI controller to a system that moves all existing SCSI
> > > devices.  You will like LABEL then.
> > 
> > Surely the proportion of users who want to do this is vanishingly small?
> 
> Actually, this has nothing to do with SCSI.  The reason for LABEL is so
> that people who move stuff around inside their computers...
....
> This is a lot more probable in this day and age of Firewire and USB2
> drives, which can come and go fleetingly.
....
> confusing if you move a drive from one machine to another and suddenly
> end up with two drives labelled "/", but it at least reduces the scope
> for messes. 


Using LABEL hardly makes sense on a personal workstation or other
small machine.  But in a big box that contains lots of controllers and
hundreds of drives well selected disk and partition LABEL names can
save your bacon.

The Fedora problem is that a label "/" is too simple a use of a
solution intended to address a much bigger problem.

On the small end of things, the growing availability of inexpensive
Firewire, USB, and yea iPod class devices sets the stage where this
has value.

Consider the office worker that lugs a lap top about. One could switch
to a strategy where $HOME/ lives on an iPod or equivalent.  LABEL can
make sure the mount is in the correct location for you etc....  



-- 
	T o m  M i t c h e l l 
	/dev/null the ultimate in secure storage.