On Mon, Aug 12, 2019 at 08:21:31AM -0700, Roopa Prabhu wrote:

On Sun, Aug 11, 2019 at 3:10 PM Michal Kubecek [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

Not all of them are hardware based, there are also links based on
filesystem label or UUID. But my point is rather that udev creates
multiple links so that any of them can be used in any place where
a block device is to be identified.

As network devices can have only one name, udev drops kernel provided
name completely and replaces it with name following one naming scheme.
Thus we have to know which naming scheme is going to be used and make
sure it does not change. With multiple alternative names, we could also
have all udev provided names at once (and also the original one from
kernel).

ok, understand the use-case.
But, Its hard for me to understand how udev is going to manage this
list of names without structure to them.
Plus how is udev going to distinguish its own names from user given name ?.

I thought this list was giving an opportunity to use the long name
everywhere else.
But if this is going to be managed by udev with a bunch of structured
names, I don't understand how the rest of the system is going to use
these names.

Maybe we should just call this a udev managed list of names.

(again, i think the best way to do this for udev is to provide the
symlink like facility via devlink or any other infra).

I certainly didn't want to suggest for alternative names to be managed
by udev. What I meant was that supporting multiple alternative names
would allow udev to create its names based on e.g. device bus address,
BIOS/UEFI slot number, MAC address etc. But it would still be up to
admins if they want to create their own names.

Michal