what kind of /etc/fstab is this?

[Michael Hennebry]

On Sun, 25 May 2008, Amadeus W.M. wrote:

> On Sat, 24 May 2008 23:14:29 -0400, Todd Zullinger wrote:
>
> > Amadeus W.M. wrote:
> >> So I can't change this, can I?
> >
> > You're perfectly free to change them.  However, if you change them to
> > use device names, you're not allowed to complain if it breaks because
> > the device names change on reboot someday. :)
> >
>
> That's precisely my worry.

I had precisely that problem when troubleshooting
difficulties with moving /home.
Knoppix and Fedora used different device names.
Adding to the confusion was a swap partition whose label
included a device name that no longer applied to it.

> I'm not convinced about the utility of having schizophrenic partition
> labels upon install, with no other option. How many people run several
> unixes on the same computer? 5% maybe? Then maybe they should be given the
> option to have ugly labels, and let the rest of us have pretty labels by
> default.

I'd recommend labels along the lines of
something-pretty-and-meaningful_disk-sequence-number_partition-sequence-number

disk-sequence-number would distinguish a
disk from every other disk you ever owned.
Three digits would be more than enough for most of us.

Similarly, partition-sequence-number would distingusih a partition
from every other partition that was ever on that disk.
Three digits should be a great plenty.

something-pretty-and-meaningful is pretty much a matter of whim,
but I'd avoid anything with /dev in it.

BTW labels are not the same as UUIDs,
but I don't know much more than that about UUIDs.

-- 
Michael   hennebry at web.cs.ndsu.NoDak.edu
"Those parts of the system that you can hit with a hammer (not advised)
are called Hardware;  those program instructions that you can only
curse at are called Software."