>> I think it is historical, combined with having no reason to change it.
>> Having your ehterhnet interface called eth0 consistently, has only
>> advantages on desktop machines with only a single ethernet card.
>
>Is that not reason enough?  It would be very nice to be able to swap a 
>failing ethernet card with a replacement with a different chipset 
>without having to edit several files in /etc.
>
>Ideally, you could swap out an ethernet card in a box with multiple 
>cards and not have it's number change, which would allow one to fix a 
>hardware problem without editing files (good for 3rd party remote data 
>centre fixes).  I'm not sure how cards are numbered on different arch's, 
>however, so this may not be a practical goal.

so far, the scenarios you've come up with would require the renaming
of one file in /etc.  i suggest that you'd be much more upset if you
removed a card and had all your interfaces renumbered for you.

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