Re: [gentoo-user] Disk Labels in Handbook

[Alan McKinnon <alan.mckinnon@gmail.com>]

Apparently, though unproven, at 16:27 on Wednesday 09 February 2011, Mark 
Knecht did opine thusly:

> On Wed, Feb 9, 2011 at 6:16 AM, Dale <rdalek1967@gmail.com> wrote:
> > James wrote:
> >> Hello,
> >> 
> >> So looking at the handbook, I was wondering
> >> why it does not describe how to use Disk Labels
> >> during the installation process. Dunno.
> >> 
> >> So I poised this question on gentoo-doc
> >> and got this encouraging response from *JOSH*
> >> 
> >> snip
> >> 
> >> 
> >> James
> > 
> > Given that some folks on here have ran into USB drives changing the order
> > of partitions, I think this is a good idea.  If needed, they could at
> > least introduce the subject then have it link to another page.  Even if
> > it is the simplest label of using boot, root and such labels and maybe a
> > mention that there are other ways to accomplish the same thing.
> > 
> > I ran into this issue a while back when I added a hard drive and it was
> > not easy to work with.  When I boot a CD/DVD, it sees them as hd*
> > instead of sd* so that didn't help since the OS kernel sees them as sd*.
> > 
> > It may be uphill to get this included or at least linked to something
> > else explaining it but I think it is a good idea.  I also added myself
> > to the bug as well.  I saw the post on -doc.
> > 
> > Dale
> 
> Following Walt's recent thread about his experiences using grub2 I
> think getting folks used to disk labels at installation time, be they
> names or even better UUID's, might fit in very well with installation
> instructions that cover using grub2 instead of grub as a boot loader.

From a practical perspective, fs labels are easier than GUIDs, so I would 
recommend labels. Users can invent their own descriptive labels at install 
time and enter that into fstab.

"LABEL=SERVER1-ROOT" is not much more effort than "/dev/sda3"

GUIDs are another story. They get autogenerated, are invariably displayed on 
the screen along with a huge number of other GUIDs (Murphy) and one has to 
copy paste the damn things into vi.

GUIDs are great for ubuntu where an install script does all the heavy lifting, 
but Gentoo, being a vastly superior operating system, has made the 
devastatingly astounding assumption that users are actually able to think and 
type. Whodathunkedit?

If we expect users to type stuff, we should set it up so they type easy stuff 
:-)

-- 
alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com