On Wednesday 23 April 2008, Mark Knecht wrote: > On Wed, Apr 23, 2008 at 12:40 AM, Alan McKinnon
> > Personally, I prefer labels over other disk id methods. I get to > > choose the label myself and can ensure they are unique in my world > > (but maybe not in the universe like UUIDs are). If I have to mkfs a > > volume from scratch for some reason, it's easier for me to to > > re-use the same label than to re-use or copy-paste those long UUID > > strings > I like labels also. I've had a couple of cases where I've taken a > drive out of an old system but kept the drive around. Later I put the > drive in a 1394 drive case.I checked the drive label and immediately > knew it was a drive with ripped music, sessions I've recorded in > Ardour, etc. Labels are human readable and I tend to make them quite > descriptive. Just to expand a bit: UUIDs are guaranteed to be unique in the whole world, that's why distro installers use them - you can issue guarantees that the installer will get it right. LABELs have no such guarantee and installers need the user to be clued up enough to pick decent ones. As we all know, average users often aren't up to that. The majority of Ubuntu's target market (just to pick a random example) certainly aren't. So the installer is between a rock and a hard place - use the method guaranteed to work today, but is not really human-readable, or use a lesser method with a few caveats (like a trained user). It's the old story all over again - use the one that works best for you as long as you know enough to be able to decide -- Alan McKinnon alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com -- [email protected] mailing list
