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

[Les Mikesell]

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