Dan McGee schrieb:
And then we are back to square one- having the installer being tightly coupled with a particular live CD. You should be able to run the installer from any environment, including another distro. Obviously we have a lot of work to do in order to make this possible, but the above simple logic seems to take us in the wrong direction.
If the particular file doesn't exist, we just leave the default configuration alone, period.
You are missing the most important problem, one which you simply can't dismiss by saying it's the user's problem: The ordering in which drivers for several controllers are loaded is changing with kernel updates, udev updates, or even randomly between reboots. Almost everyone has several controllers (for example, one onboard sata, one onboard ide, or in my case, one onboard sata, one onboard ide, one pci ide). When sda becomdes sdc at the next boot, and is then sdb and then sda again, then we have a basically unusable distribution. This is the issue we should be concentrating on (I proposed several alternatives already), not the ide vs. pata issue, which is - as mentioned - easily solved.I don't dismiss this as the users problem. Instead, I take a look at my own fstab which was recommended by us quite some time ago: # <file system> <dir> <type> <options> <dump> <pass> none /dev/pts devpts defaults 0 0 none /dev/shm tmpfs defaults 0 0 #/dev/hdc /media/cd0 iso9660 user,ro,noauto,unhide 0 0 #/dev/hdd /media/cd1 iso9660 user,ro,noauto,unhide 0 0 #/dev/hdc /media/dvd udf user,ro,noauto,unhide 0 0 #/dev/fd0 /media/fl auto user,noauto 0 0 LABEL=hdroot / ext3 defaults 0 1 LABEL=hdboot /boot ext2 defaults 0 2 LABEL=swapspace swap swap defaults 0 0 Now why aren't we doing something like this instead? Obviously the links in /dev/disk/by-* would work just fine here. I can boot this system with either IDE or PATA (which only works 50% of the time), but the drives are all mounted correctly and in the right places.
Which was one of my suggestions, only I wouldn't use labels, but uuids (not every partition has a label, all have uuids).
However, every other udev update breaks labels and uuids for device-mapper devices (like lvm), so we'd need exceptions for those (they have persistant names anyway) ... all not that pretty.
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