Re: GuixSD bootable ISO-9669 image

[Danny Milosavljevic <dannym@scratchpost.org>]

Hi Ludo,

On Fri, 12 May 2017 17:33:21 +0200
ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès) wrote:
> Then users should pick the right one, usually the macro, and get an
> error when they pass an invalid UUID.

Note that the directory /dev/disk/by-uuid doesn't contain any marker about what kind of uuid it is. So it would make things complicated for the user.

I wouldn't expect anyone that isn't a programmer to know that fat32 uuids are different from btrfs uuids.

If we have different uuid macros, we should have *-uuid macros for *every* possible filesystem type, whether the uuids differ or not - at least then there's a pattern for the user to learn.  Not like 3 macros and 14 filesystem types so you'd have to have a mapping function in your head.

But really, I myself use uuids only for file-system entries to be bus independent so I can plug known disks on whatever slot I want and they'll be mounted at the same place regardless.  I guess another use case is for the Guix LiveCD to find itself - for the same reason.  Not sure what the complication of bytevectors, multiple macros etcetc buys us.  The user is probably copy&pasting the uuid from /dev/disk/by-uuid anyway.  It's not like you type in uuids (ever).