Bug#614898: closed by martin f krafft <madduck at debian.org> (Re: Bug#614898: initramfs-tools: different punctuation in uuids in /etc/mdadm/mdadm.conf causes spurious error messages)

[Phil Karn]

On 2/23/11 10:27 PM, Debian Bug Tracking System wrote:
> This is an automatic notification regarding your Bug report
> which was filed against the mdadm package:
> 
> #614898: initramfs-tools: different punctuation in uuids in /etc/mdadm/mdadm.conf causes spurious error messages
> 
> It has been closed by martin f krafft <madduck at debian.org>.
> 
> Their explanation is attached below along with your original report.
> If this explanation is unsatisfactory and you have not received a
> better one in a separate message then please contact martin f krafft <madduck at debian.org> by
> replying to this email.
> 
> 

>There is only one convention with UUIDs in mdadm and it's
>consistently used in mdadm. No other tool writes or uses the UUIDs
>in mdadm.conf.

There's a detailed mdadm.conf manual page that describes the syntax.
There are no warnings there or in /etc/mdadm/mdadm.conf that it
shouldn't edit it manually. So I did -- and that's how I introduced a
UUID syntax that wasn't recognized.

>I understand your point but I don't think this warrants the effort.
>Please provide a tested patch if you really care that much (and
>reopen the bug report).

Well, this one wasted a fair amount of my time before it occurred to me
that there might be a bug in UUID comparisons. (Consider the number of
websites that refuse to take spaces or any other punctuation in credit
card numbers). If it bit me, I'm sure it has bitten and will bit others,
and I'd like to save them the aggravation.

If the code isn't changed to ignore punctuation in comparisons, this
behavior should at the very least be documented in the manual page and
with a comment in anything that generates mdadm.conf. Leaving this bug
open would also help anyone investigating the problem.

What threw me was that the punctuation required appears to be completely
*non standard* outside Debian: colons every 32 bits. I do not see this
format anywhere else that UUIDs are used or described; the Wikipedia
page, for example, leaves the very strong impression that canonical
UUIDs are always in the form

hhhhhhhh-hhhh-hhhh-hhhh-hhhhhhhhhhhh

possibly surrounded by {curly braces}.

--Phil