Why is everything so complicated now?
by hazel from LinuxQuestions.org on (#6M2BX)
Background to the rant: Yesterday morning I booted into AntiX to do my weekly update. After completing this, I decided to take advantage of my early morning "free download period" to download the packages that I would need to start my new LFS build. It seemed sensible to transfer them from Antix's ~/Downloads to LFS's /sources directory before logging off and shutting down. And I found I couldn't do it!
Tried to do it in the file manager and was told I had to be root. Yet /etc/fstab said that all my guest partitions were user-mountable! Tried to do it several different ways with mount and got told either that the disk didn't exist or that it wasn't in fstab. So then I checked the entries in /dev/disk/by-label one by one and found that the partition had a different UUID from the one listed in fstab. And then I realised what had happened. Like most people I clear partitions by reformatting them with mkfs and a new filesystem means a new UUID.
Rant begins
All Debian distros use UUIDs in the fstab created by the installer. I believe other distro families do this too.
a) This is ugly and confusing. You can't really see what gets mounted where. AntiX at least provides comment lines with the correct partition device above each active line, but the need to do that at all proves my point. The contents of a major file like fstab should be self-explanatory.
b) It is very difficult to use the mount command with such long partition IDs. And you can't use the mountpoints instead because, idiotically, they take the form /media/UUID. Cut-and-paste is the only thing that works.
c) Partitions are seldom deleted but often repurposed, especially in a multiboot machine. The quickest way to repurpose a partition is to reformat it. Did the Debian developers not realise that, compared with device names, UUIDs are ephemeral and can easily get out of date? Again fstab is too important a file to be made so fragile.
d) Most drives are gpt now so if ID strings are really needed (and I'm told that they are necessary in server machines), the installer should at least check for this and use GUIDs where available and not UUIDs.
Thank God Slackware is still sane!
Tried to do it in the file manager and was told I had to be root. Yet /etc/fstab said that all my guest partitions were user-mountable! Tried to do it several different ways with mount and got told either that the disk didn't exist or that it wasn't in fstab. So then I checked the entries in /dev/disk/by-label one by one and found that the partition had a different UUID from the one listed in fstab. And then I realised what had happened. Like most people I clear partitions by reformatting them with mkfs and a new filesystem means a new UUID.
Rant begins
All Debian distros use UUIDs in the fstab created by the installer. I believe other distro families do this too.
a) This is ugly and confusing. You can't really see what gets mounted where. AntiX at least provides comment lines with the correct partition device above each active line, but the need to do that at all proves my point. The contents of a major file like fstab should be self-explanatory.
b) It is very difficult to use the mount command with such long partition IDs. And you can't use the mountpoints instead because, idiotically, they take the form /media/UUID. Cut-and-paste is the only thing that works.
c) Partitions are seldom deleted but often repurposed, especially in a multiboot machine. The quickest way to repurpose a partition is to reformat it. Did the Debian developers not realise that, compared with device names, UUIDs are ephemeral and can easily get out of date? Again fstab is too important a file to be made so fragile.
d) Most drives are gpt now so if ID strings are really needed (and I'm told that they are necessary in server machines), the installer should at least check for this and use GUIDs where available and not UUIDs.
Thank God Slackware is still sane!