From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Danny Milosavljevic Subject: Re: Drive identifiers Date: Fri, 19 Jan 2018 08:22:17 +0100 Message-ID: <20180119082217.42ae293b@scratchpost.org> References: <87mv1c4kp7.fsf@gnu.org> <86y3kvzypj.fsf@gmail.com> <20180118102914.6cb68394@scratchpost.org> <86po66isol.fsf@gmail.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Return-path: Received: from eggs.gnu.org ([2001:4830:134:3::10]:37696) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1ecR0O-0001IY-EF for guix-devel@gnu.org; Fri, 19 Jan 2018 02:22:29 -0500 Received: from Debian-exim by eggs.gnu.org with spam-scanned (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1ecR0L-0001th-Ra for guix-devel@gnu.org; Fri, 19 Jan 2018 02:22:28 -0500 In-Reply-To: <86po66isol.fsf@gmail.com> List-Id: "Development of GNU Guix and the GNU System distribution." List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Errors-To: guix-devel-bounces+gcggd-guix-devel=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Sender: "Guix-devel" To: myglc2@gmail.com Cc: Guix-devel Hi, On Thu, 18 Jan 2018 19:43:54 -0500 myglc2@gmail.com wrote: > Here I comment on consequences of having > the SN of a HD in a file held by that HD. IMO this is like having the > directory name in a file held by the directory. Both raise the same > issue: the file is no longer relocatable. > > In our case, as you point out, this creates a new error > case. Unfortunately we can't possibly know the best way to handle > it. Yeah, I thought about it some more and I think the best way to handle it is to NOT store the SN in a file on disk and to not have a second pass. If we implement it in a way that "guix system init" and "guix system reconfigure" only resolve the SN to a device name and then install to the device by device name it means that even when doing a drive replacement, grub will still boot from the new drive (because it just boots from whatever fixed device it was installed to and doesn't care about the SN). Once the user reconfigures guix the next time (for something unrelated maybe) they'll get an error message because a drive with that SN is not found. What was I thinking with the extra file? It's better without :)