Re: retiring device.map

[Colin D Bennett <colin@gibibit.com>]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1629 bytes --]

On Thu, 8 May 2008 01:39:47 +0800
Bean <bean123ch@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Thu, May 8, 2008 at 1:22 AM, Pavel Roskin <proski@gnu.org> wrote:
> > On Wed, 2008-05-07 at 15:03 +0200, Robert Millan wrote:
> >  > On Tue, May 06, 2008 at 11:43:48AM -0400, Pavel Roskin wrote:
> >  > > On Tue, 2008-05-06 at 17:18 +0200, Robert Millan wrote:
> >  > >
> >  > > > I completely agree.  How do we go about this?  First of all
> >  > > > we need support for labels, right?
> >  > >
> >  > > We have it already in the "search" command.  Of course, there
> >  > > is always room for improvement.  GRUB doesn't recognize Linux
> >  > > swap labels.  It cannot set root to, say, partition 3 on a
> >  > > disk where partition 1 has the given label.
> >  >
> >  > Sorry, I was confusing labels with UUIDs.  The problem with
> >  > labels is they're not garanteed to be unique, right?  So maybe
> >  > we need support for UUIDs..
> >
> >  Right.
> 
> Yes, UUID can be useful, it's better to add it to grub2.

I think that while labels (like "linux boot", "swap 2", etc.) are
useful and easy to use for fixed disk drives (and conveniently avoid
problems when drive order is changed!), they are inadequate for
removable drives such as USB flash drives or external hard drives,
where it is easy to run into name clashes--for instance, when swapping
external drives between machines, they might have the same name but have
slightly different purposes/content and need different treatment. In
some cases like this, the UUID seems a better choice than a label (copy
and paste is your friend, however).

Regards,
Colin

[-- Attachment #2: signature.asc --]
[-- Type: application/pgp-signature, Size: 197 bytes --]