Comment 3 for bug 321324

I don't intend to change this significantly. UUIDs do have their problems, but so does every other available method. That said, I do intend to fix bug 320871 for Jaunty, which will make it easier for system administrators to assign labels. Labels aren't appropriate for automatic assignment, though, so UUIDs will remain as a fallback.

I'm afraid you're demonstrably mistaken that the boot disk can never change its device name. If nothing else, it's not that long since most IDE controllers were taken over by the PATA subsystem in the kernel, which changed nearly everyone's /dev/hda to /dev/sda. That was the impetus for us implementing UUID support. Even beyond that, enumeration order is not guaranteed to be stable if you have multiple disks.

I posted a verbose summary of the issues here, which you can explain to your students if you like:

  http://lists.debian.org/debian-boot/2008/12/msg00338.html