Re: Drive identifiers

[Danny Milosavljevic <dannym@scratchpost.org>]

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 :)