A curse on LABEL=

[Jeff Vian]

Timothy Murphy wrote:

>Richard Lynch wrote:
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>>Lets say I have a single drive dual boot system.  The 1st two primary
>>partitions are Windows.  The rest of the partitions on the drive are for
>>Linux.   The 1st primary (C:) is full.  The second (D:) is barely used.
>>I buy a new drive and, using a partitioning tool (e.g. PartitionMagic),
>>I create a new primary on the second drive and copy all my stuff from
>>the 2nd partition on the 1st drive to it.  I delete the 2nd partition on
>>the 1st drive and expand the 1st partition into the new free space.
>>Now, for Windows, my C: and D: drives are intact and C: is no longer
>>full.  D: is on my new drive.  However, for Linux, /dev/hda3 has become
>>/dev/hda2.  With the LABEL= approach the system will still boot.  With
>>hardcoded devices it wont.
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>Surely someone who knew how to do all that
>would realise he had to edit /etc/fstab and /etc/grub.conf ?
>That would be the least of his worries, I would have thought.
>
>In any case, it's a pretty unusual scenario to base a Linux feature on.
>
>However, I've given my views, and will "let it rest".
>
>To my mind, the response shows that people in charge of large systems
>are more or less incapable of putting themselves in the position of newbies.
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The earlier example with a firewire or usb drive (particularly the 
rapily proliferating quantitly of usb flash drives) that is used as a 
home directory is a very real and pervasive argument for using labels. 
 If an unlabeled usb/firewire device is transfered to a different 
machine it likely will not mount properly.

 From an administrators view,  the user probably does not have root 
access to manually make the changes (or the knowledge to know how). 
 Thus labels do have a very real place.

 From a security standpoint, this causes other problems, but that is 
another tale.

Jeff

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