<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
<html>
<head>
<meta content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" http-equiv="Content-Type">
</head>
<body bgcolor="#ffffff" text="#000000">
Robert Millan wrote:
<blockquote cite="mid:20080626145143.GB24932@thorin" type="cite">
<pre wrap="">On Wed, Jun 25, 2008 at 06:38:54PM -0400, Jim Bray wrote:
</pre>
<blockquote type="cite">
<pre wrap="">[...], given that automatically
generating grub.cfg boot entries can result in a non-booting system,
</pre>
</blockquote>
<pre wrap=""><!---->
How's this related to UUIDs? (btw, manually generating boot entries can
result in a non-bootable system too, and is in fact more likely).
</pre>
</blockquote>
<br>
I build custom kernels. They have always worked fine with normal
'root='/dev booting, but never with UUIDs. I have never investigated
why not, because I don't want to use UUIDS. I strayed from decades-long
running of Debian/unstable+experimental to Ubuntu for a while, but
dumped Ubuntu in part because they had decided in their infinite wisdom
(read arrogance) that UUIDs should be mandatory, and I got tired of
fixing my menu.lst after their update-grub turned all of my 'root=/dev'
or 'root=LABEL' into 'root=UUID' every time update-grub got run.<br>
<br>
There was a long tradition in the u**X world that config-files should
be human-readable and -editable. I think it is a good tradition. UUIDs
completely break that. I am not willing to have my fstab and boot
entries be for all intents and purposes binary. One possible way to
deal with this for those who want UUIDs and readability is to have a
/boot/grub/UUID-label file which maps UUIDS to user-chosen labels, thus
hiding the gibberish a bit. But I have no need for it. I know what and
where my disks are.<br>
<blockquote cite="mid:20080626145143.GB24932@thorin" type="cite">
<pre wrap="">
</pre>
<blockquote type="cite">
<pre wrap="">and
that many people prefer human-readable config file entries in the Unix
tradition and not a bunch of hexadecimal garbage in our fstabs and boot
config files.
</pre>
</blockquote>
<pre wrap=""><!---->
The majority of people prefer systems that can boot, which in multiple disk
scenarios GRUB can only archieve via BIOS numbering guesswork.
</pre>
</blockquote>
<br>
'root=LABEL' works fine for that. Myself, while I have only one
internal drive, I often boot with a USB drive plugged in. It appears as
sda instead of sdb only if I set the BIOS to boot from it. I've been
booting Un*x systems in one form or other since about 1983 and never
yet need a bunch of hexadecimal gibberish to do so, only to fail to do
so. I have no objection to UUIDs being available, but I will give up on
Linux entirely if all the distros start imposing them.<br>
<blockquote cite="mid:20080626145143.GB24932@thorin" type="cite">
<pre wrap="">
Anyway, if it really bothers you, just adjust the config files in /etc/grub.d
to your needs. It's hard to get any more customizable than that...
</pre>
</blockquote>
<br>
The stock '10_linux' entry will be overwritten every time a new
version of grub comes out, or at the very least dpkg will ask me which
config file I want, the old or new.<br>
<br>
</body>
</html>