Bug report out of context: Harcy handling of /dev/sd? devices is unacceptable

[Derek Broughton]

Alan E. Davis wrote:

> However, the behavior of Ubuntu
> 2008.04 pertaining to mixed PATA and SATA drives is insuperable.
...
> I have posted several times to the Ubuntu mailing list or forums.  I
> understand the overwhelming volume as an issue, and perhaps some of my
> posts were not well written, but I cannot remember very many
> times---perhaps only
> 20%---when I've received a response.  

Posted about this?  Doesn't it strike you that it's a pretty small
percentage of us who would _have_ mixed PATA/SATA drives on our systems?

>     I experienced a plethora of problems involving /etc/fstab, grub.
>     Device names were inconsistent.  I have one PATA drive and one
>     SATA drive.  Assignment of previous /dev/hda to /dev/sda coopted
>     the earlier assignment on several Linux distros, by assigning
>     normal /dev/sda and /dev/sdb, etc.  I have several HDDs that I
>     swap in and out between two machines.

Not a problem.  Use UUID or LABEL for mounting.  Reassigning /dev/hda drives
to /dev/sda isn't an Ubuntu problem - it was mandated by kernel changes.

>     Due to the inability of grub to deal properly with the
>     installation of GRUB into the MBR, 

Huh?  What sort of bug report begins with stating as fact something that's
clearly not an issue for the average user?  You'd need to give a whole lot
more background to that issue.

>     I had to use a Gentoo install 
>     disk, and install from that, before being able to get Ubuntu to
>     boot using grub.  It worked out, once this had been done, that
>     Ubuntu's grub then wrote a /boot/grub/menu.lst with a device
>     number that did not jibe with the actual device ordering.

I'm guessing, though you haven't explicitly stated it, that you have
removable drives here.  It's a simple fact that removing drives can change
the device ordering.  As far as grub is concerned, the device it's booting
from is (hd0), but grub is likely to not have much control of the ordering
of the rest of the drives.

>     As a consequence of the naming debacle, I inadvertently wrote over
>     a 40+ GB partition, mistaking it for a different one.  I am
>     reporting this as a bug.  

You wrote over a 40GB partition and blame Ubuntu?  Come on, now.  Modifying
partitions is _always_ dangerous, and the only way Ubuntu can stop you
doing that is to not provide partition managers.

>     the difficulties of using 
>     Ubuntu forums (require the copying of digits from an image just to
>     read!  Ridiculous and a waste of time.)  

This wouldn't be any place to complain about that.  We aren't using web
forums for a reason...

>     seem to have conspired 
>     against the bug being widely recognized.  Hardy Heron should not
>     have been released with this bug.  The fact that it was indicates
>     that the powers that be placed marketing issues ahead of a
>     critical bug.  Why was it not recognized?

I still haven't figured out what you think is a bug.

>     The new fstab using UUID has been a major headache.

Not half as much as NOT using UUID would have been.

> Please do not try to answer about the SATA/PATA issue or the Grub issue,
> unless you can report that the problem has been resolved.  I have no use
> for
> further explanations of the preference for UUID in /etc/fstab.  Ubuntu
> Hardy Heron seems to have taken a perilous fork in the road, and despite
> any conceivable explanation, it leaves the user in less control of his
> system.
 
Well, if you don't intend to actually explain your problem, or to examine it
further to find out what the problem really is, we can't help.  And if you
want to just blindly insist that the only problem is that LINUX (not  
Ubuntu) renamed your devices, then we probably don't _want_ to help.  

So far I've seen no indication that anything happened to you that won't
happen under Gentoo.
-- 
derek