Linux is not about choice [was Re: Fedora too cutting edge?]

[David Zeuthen]

On Thu, 2008-01-10 at 11:00 -0600, Les Mikesell wrote:
> But the old names were predictable; the new ones aren't - when I move a 
> disk to a new controller/drive position, I know about it.

Uhm, no. You were just relying on a) limitations in the Linux kernel to
probe devices in a sequential fashion (see big-iron boxes with tens of
thousands of disks why this won't work); and b) the order of your
controllers on the PCI bus. Trying to argue it was "predictable" when it
was a "coincidence" is an interesting spin on reality. It's also wrong;
there's a reason that RHL and Fedora been using LABEL= for ages.

A side effect of Fedora and Linux being modernized is that you have
stable names so in the future problems like you describe will go away.
However, one issue is to make all the stuff in the distro actually take
advantage of new shiny stuff; for example Anaconda just recently started
to take it's first steps in the brave new world. It's a bit sad that it
takes 2-3 years for things like this to happen, maybe someone having
been yelling enough at e.g. the Anaconda team ;-)

> What I actually would argue is that a distribution making such changes 
> should supply tools to migrate configurations based on old conventions 
> to the new ones.  Maybe Fedora doesn't have users with hundreds of 
> machines and data that needs to span years of operation, but a unix-like 
> system should be designed to make that practical.

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.

     David