[PATCH] Cygwin: Add /dev/disk/by-label and /dev/disk/by-uuid symlinks

[Christian Franke]

Hi Corinna,

Corinna Vinschen wrote:
> Hi Christian,
>
>
> On second thought...
>
> I had a bad night tonight and was thinking a long time about this and
> that.  It suddenly occured to me that there might be another problem
> with this approach, attaching ordinals to the label name.
>
> Assuming you have a single filesystem labled "VOLUME" which is on a
> fixed disk.  So you get something like this:
>
>    $ ls -l /dev/disk/by-label
>    total 0
>    lrwxrwxrwx 1 corinna vinschen 0 Nov 22 10:09  VOLUME -> ../../sdb1
>    lrwxrwxrwx 1 corinna vinschen 0 Nov 22 10:10  root -> ../../sda3
>
> Now you insert an USB Stick with a FAT32 filesystem, also labeled
> "VOLUME".  Now you get something like this:
>
>    $ ls -l /dev/disk/by-label
>    total 0
>    lrwxrwxrwx 1 corinna vinschen 0 Nov 22 10:12 'VOLUME#0' -> ../../sdb1
>    lrwxrwxrwx 1 corinna vinschen 0 Nov 22 10:12 'VOLUME#1' -> ../../sdc1
>    lrwxrwxrwx 1 corinna vinschen 0 Nov 22 10:10  root -> ../../sda3
>
> So the label name changes, depending on inserting or removing another
> partition.

This is intentional. If the first duplicate appears, it is IMO better to 
also replace the original name to show that a duplicate exists.


>
> Not saying I have a good solution myself, so I wonder if we should just
> let it slip, but I thought we should at least talk about it...

Users should be aware that unspecific label names like VOLUME could not 
be used as a persistent link if drives are changed.

Same may apply to by-partuuid names as preformatted SD-cards and USB 
flash drives may have a null MBR serial number.

Regards,
Christian