> Personally I also feel that all possible solutions effectively make > /etc/fstab unreadable and unmaintainable. Maybe Debian should > lead the way > to make /etc/fstab a generated file (like e.g. modules.conf used to be). what is so bad about /dev/disk/by-path/pci-0000:00:07.1-ide-0:0-part1 ?
it says exactly where the controller is on the PCI bus, which device it is on the controller and which partition it is. Someone seeing that pattern should easilly be able to add entries for other drives and partitions on the same controller and with a bit more work (e.g. reading lspci and/or looking through /dev/disk/by-path) for drives on other controllers. sure its a little on the long side and you might want to change the spacing in fstab to reflect that but we have editors with copy and paste. A bit of extra verbosity in device names seems a small price to pay to get device names that are stable and reliable. The hd? system was very nice when most people just had a single ide controller with all their (sd? was alwats nasty afaict but few enough people had scsi that it didn't hit too many newbies) but times have moved on and it simply isn't possible to reliablly indentify drives with an identifier that short anymore. i don't see what generating fstab would gain. you are still going to have to have a configuration file that contains all the information about what to mount where including a method for identifying drives even accross addition of new hardware.
