Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote:

>> It isn't a very good idea.
>> It is an extremely bad idea,
>> which has caused endless problems,
>> and whose merit is miniscule.
>
> Umm. Not true. It's *extremely* useful if you image and reorder
> partitions or add disks or swap them from machine to machine, and it's
> especially useful for dual or triple-boot systems.

On the bad side, it is obvious from postings on the linux newsgroups
that many people have problems because of disk-labels.

So what can you say on the good side?

To start with, very few people "image and reorder" partitions,
whatever that means, so we can ignore that.

How exactly does it help with dual-boot systems?

As for adding or swapping disks, far from helping
it is obvious from many posts
that it causes great confusion,
basically because the same label may be used in two places.
eg someone adds a disk and either they
or more likely the installation process
labels one partition /usr ,
and it turns out there is already a partition
on another disk labelled /usr .

Or another cause of confusion is where the labels
in /etc/fstab and lilo.conf don't match.

I can't think of any situation where labelling saves
more than 5 seconds _once_ when you are adding a disk, etc.

I repeat -- using disk-labels instead of proper names like /dev/hda3
is a very bad idea,
and whoever thought of it should be sent to Guantanomo Bay.


--
Timothy Murphy
e-mail: tim@birdsnest.maths.tcd.ie
tel: +353-86-233 6090
s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland