On Thu, 2023-10-26 at 06:50 +0200, Jiri Slaby wrote:
why should we care at all?
...
Using /dev/sd* in fstab is broken for years. So anyone using that should be forced to fix it for good and not find workarounds. Or am I missing something?
Right. It hasn't been actually stable for decades, and this has been communicated extensively. *It's still discouraged to refer to any device by its device node name*. Nothing has changed in this respect.
I think some care is is waranted... In principle, /dev/sd* has not been stable for decades, but in practice, for many, especially those with simple desktops, it's been stable since the beginning. The default actual-experience has just now changed. Plus there are other reasons to care... There are heaps of examples of using df, lsblk, smartctl, hdparm, etcetera, that don't mention the instability of /dev/sd*. If anyone has baked those examples that scripts they would have worked nicely until the recent change. It would also be useful if people were able to give desktop advice that isn't perturbed by potential instabilities. Imagine giving advice on manually formatting a file-system, but unbeknownst to the advice-giver, the user has rebooted since posting the question. One could always preface such advice with prerequisites and explanations concerning /dev/sd* and it instabilities, but how many actually do? Then there's the day when one misreads the output from lsblk or similar, or fails to remember that you've booted since last running it. Stability makes that kind of accident a little lest likely - a nice to have unless you have a strong preference for school of hard knocks. I stress I'm writing more from the point of keeping things simple for the small desktop user. For the reasons outlined above, I think stability for that kind of user is good to have, especially if it can be achieved relatively easily. Michael