Is fsck obsolet for journaling FS? - Was: How do I Automount [snip]

[Oliver Grawert]

hi,
Am Montag, den 30.11.2015, 20:34 +0200 schrieb Tom H:
> On Mon, Nov 30, 2015 at 5:53 PM, C de-Avillez <hggdh2 at ubuntu.com>
> wrote:
> > On Sun, 29 Nov 2015 23:18:14 +0100 Ralf Mardorf <
> > silver.bullet at zoho.com> wrote:

> 
> When Oliver said that fstab could be deleted, he was probably
> thinking
> of a default latest Ubuntu desktop use-case whereby someone has an
> EFI
> box with "/boot/efi", "/", "swap", and perhaps "/home". These
> partitions have a GPT PART/UUID type [1] that's recognized by systemd
> and are therefore auto-mounted correctly.
> 
> [1] Frustratingly, different tools label this property differently:
> 
> blkid --> n/a
> fdisk --> Type-UUID
> lsblk --> PARTTYPE
> partx --> TYPE
> 

the kernel properly re-assigns "root=UUID=...." from the kernel
commandline (as set by all ubuntu installers) to /dev/root and will
just boot away with it ... (virtual filesystems are handled by a file
outside of /etc/fstab that gets parsed on boot)...

As Robert Heller and Petter Adsen pointed out this only works on local
single partition systems ... 
i'm not sure about /home in the case of a systemd based install and if
the installer puts a unit in place for mounting it  (will try that on
the weekend, ;) ) 

i pointed this out mostly for anecdotal purpose. A properly installed
Ubuntu (i.e. one that was installed using one of the supported
installers (not debootstrap) ...) will always have an fstab and no
enduser should need to tinker with it (or remove it etc). As i said
before i'd advise endusers to actually use the GUI tool simply because
it has builtin error checking, will make sure you wont mess up the file
and will set sane defaults.

The core point here was Ralf claiming that there is no other way than
to edit fstab and that "endusers will have to learn about it" instead
of giving them the right tool to do it in a less scary and more safe
way. i can imagine a future where everything uses systemd units and
fstab is gone completely, which will move maintenance of your
mountpoints over to simple systemctrl enable/disable calls (and where
the GUI tool will simply be adapted to this transparently for the
enduser).

Anyway, Ralf managed to drag the discussion away from the actual topic
again and managed to get my blood pressure hight enough to make me make
claims in anger that are not necessary true and i apologize to the list
for anything wrong over the weekend. I will cut down my involvement in
the future (To the benefit of Ubuntu Snappy :) ) and hope that instead
others make sure this doesn't turn into a "power users only" list. The
attitude of people like Ralf made Desktop Linux fail (or "Linux for
Human Beings" however you want to put it) in the last decade and i hope
the List can help itself to not drift away from the core Ubuntu value
of unserfriendlyness that has been held high by its members over the
last years ...

I'm personally happy that my parents and my sister both don't know how
to edit and fstab file but both know how to make a disk being mounted
at boot because they have a GUI tool doing it in a safer way and
without involving a terminal window.

ciao
	oli

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