Linux is not about choice [was Re: Fedora too cutting edge?]
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell at gmail.com
Thu Jan 10 19:44:47 UTC 2008
David Zeuthen wrote:
>> OK, that's at least partly right but you forgot to tell me what to call
>> the device when creating the label for filesystems that support it - or
>> what name to use for access to the raw device for operations like image
>> copies and addition/removal from raid arrays. The underlying problem
>> can't be solved at the filesystem layer.
>
> Uhm. Did you *even* look at /dev/disk? There's by-path, by-uuid,
> by-label and so forth.
I'm looking, but I don't see consistency anywhere across linux kernels.
by-uuid, by-label seem to only refer to things that have been created
by some other access, by-id doen't always appear, and by-path varies
across kernels as the device drivers have changed. Where is something
better than device driver major/minor numbers would have been?
> Heck, SUSE/Ubuntu ships udev rules for making the
> md and dm devices use persistent naming too. Maybe if the distros were
> better at working together at the plumbing layer (another rant of
> mine)), this would be all standardized. Eventually it will all be
> standardized.
Do you expect this to be standardized only for Linux or is there hope
for a Posix specification for device name conventions?
>>> No, Fedora is about being on the bleeding edge and creating a system
>>> where you don't *need* to migrate configuration files because the files
>>> will be correct if they are using stable identifiers for devices.
>> I haven't found that to be the case. And I don't see any reason for
>> today's experimental change to end up being the one that sticks.
>
> There's nothing experimental about the path modern Linux is going in
> wrt. to device naming. If you had bothered you will fine that more and
> more device classes, including the infamous video4linux camp, is moving
> to persistent device names.
If I had bothered to what? Is this documented somewhere? Is it
version-specific to fedora?
> It's true, however, that Fedora is
> super-reluctant on taking advantage of what happens upstream and keep
> using pre-2000 technology. That's, very slowly, changing though.
Much of my data is on filesystems created before 2000. Will changing
the names used to reference them make them work better?
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell at gmail.com
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