Comment 3 for bug 119659

Radu:
Was that abuse aimed at me? It's true I am a programmer and yup I've read books on project management. I don't maintain the kernels in Ubuntu - I'm just another user. I don't even have hardware affected by this. I don't see that anyone is morally forcing you to use UUIDs/labels - you can avoid them and perhaps stuff will break. If your backup software is depending on device names then perhaps your backup software will break too? Maybe that's a bug in the backup software? Who knows?! If you really want to keep the old naming scheme you can always create udev rules to do the renaming for you...

Three of the kernels you mention were beta kernels (-12 to -14). I guess these sorts of changes happen during the testing phases as people try to work out what causes the least problems. The -16 revert is discussed in Bug #117314 .

Eventually I suspect most things will settle on libata (I believe it's Alan Cox/Jeff Garzik's decision and reasons for the move are given on http://lwn.net/Articles/198344/ ) but while some unknown subset of people are reporting issues with the libata drivers and some other set with similar hardware are reporting issue with the IDE drivers you are going to struggle to move people all at once or know who to move and who not to move.