On Wed, 2008-04-30 at 12:30 -0700, Andrew Farris wrote:
Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:
On Tue, 2008-04-29 at 22:40 -0700, Andrew Farris wrote:
Chuck Anderson wrote:
On Wed, Apr 30, 2008 at 12:35:41AM -0400, Christopher L Tubbs II wrote:
Granted, I understand that a UUID is just as good as a LABEL, as far as functionality goes, but LABELs are so much easier to read, compare, and type. Why would the F9 installer choose to create UUIDs instead of readable LABELs? I have no idea.
UUIDs are unique. LABELs may not be.
This is precisely the reason, because the realization has hit people that a system may have many linux distros installed on it, so labels made by other distros for '/' are not unique; at the same time the device names are no longer guaranteed to be in any particular ordering when some devices come and go (hotswapped drives especially). UUIDs are the identifier that won't get mixed up or changed.
It seems to me that there are two issues here:
- How do I identify my disks/partitions so I know what's going on?
- How do I tell the system what to mount where in a consistent manner.
Labels solve 1 but may fail at 2. UUIDS solve 2 but are awkward for 1.
So, off the top of my head, why not use both? It's trivial for the system to notice when two partitions have the same label, so at install time (or mount time, or whatever) it could simply offer to change one of them, e.g. if I have LABEL=foo on two partitions, relabel them foo-1 and foo-2. Keep the UUIDs but make the labels work for the humans among us.
The problem does not only arise at install time. In fact, thats the simple case. If you move a disk from system to system you could get it booting the wrong system because labels conflict, when during install it was fine. So you need to make sure when two systems are installed their labels will be sufficiently unique... foo-UUID might work fine for that but anything short of it fails.
Again, this can be dealt with by an error message or dialogue. The system notices the conflict and reports it: "Partitions x and y have the same label. Please relabel one of them to proceed." The corner case is if I remove one hd and replace it with another one with the same label, but IMHO if I do that it's because I *want* to do it, e.g. replace a failing drive with a new one, something which is currently hard (or at least messy) to do using UUIDs.
poc