Bug#486119: Proposed fix to update-grub_lib to stop unwanted 'search --fs-uuid'

[Jim Bray]

Robert Millan wrote: On Wed, Jun 25, 2008 at 06:38:54PM -0400, Jim Bray wrote: [...], given that automatically generating grub.cfg boot entries can result in a non-booting system, 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).   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.   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. 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. The majority of people prefer systems that can boot, which in multiple disk scenarios GRUB can only archieve via BIOS numbering guesswork.   '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. 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...   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. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]