Re: Linux 2.6.39-rc3

[Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>]

On Tue, Apr 12, 2011 at 9:32 PM, George Spelvin <linux@horizon.com> wrote:
>
> Note that the discussion on the libmount mailing list revealed a possible
> kernel workaround: escape the hyphens as \055.  Damn hard to read for
> a human, but it does parse correctly, and the workaround can be fixed
> once the library updates have propagated.

I'd rather replace it with some non-dash character that is
human-readable, like '+' or some utf-8 sequence that _looks_ like a
dash.

So it wouldn't parse as a uuid to some code - big deal. Clearly
neither does the correct dash. Using \055 would be just ugly.

Of course, not exposing it at all is also a reasonable strategy.

Who uses /proc/self/mountinfo? I see the problem on my alpha Fedora-15
test-machine, but Fedora-14 doesn't seem to do it. Ubuntu? SuSE? Do we
know how widespread the breakage is?

If it is _just_ Fedora-15, then I presume that pushing out the
util-linux fix and waiting a few weeks will fix it (since anybody
using F-15 right now lives on the edge anyway, and a real release
hasn't happened). But if we have real releases using it, then we may
need to look at workarounds using non-'-' characters if people really
want the uuid showing up any time soon.

                      Linus