Comment 4 for bug 799312

This bug is *still* in precise pangolin - and the fix worked a charm. In chasing this one down it looks like it's been around *AND FIXED* since April 2008 but the fix has never been carried forward.

Other bugs list very similar fixes:
222458
227705

What is the process by which a fix such as this can be moved into the official code base?

For others following:

This fix allows me to set a USB hard drive to spindown using hdparm.conf, with out needing to know what /dev/sdX it will end up coming under. I used a combination of the Disk Utility and ls -1 /dev/disk/by-id/* to find the devices manufacturer unique id

Then added:

/dev/disk/by-id/<your specific disk identifier here> {
       spindown = 241
}

to my hdparm.conf and it works fine under ubuntu 12.04 beta with this patch - no matter what order I plug in usb storage.