[Utopia] deprecating fstab-sync with mount wrapper (Was Re: Appending options for partitioned disk)

[David Zeuthen <david fubar dk>]

Hi,

I think this thread

 http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/hal/2005-May/002490.html

and countless others, shows that using hal properties (storage.policy.*
and volume.policy.*) to specify policy for mounting / unmounting volumes
isn't really the way to go :-).

Specific complaints of mine (most severe issues comes first)

 o  it's too complicated

 o  difficult to build a GUI for managing this

 o  difficult to adjust per-user

 o  there really needs to be a way for the mount program to interact
    with the desktop user (to e.g. bypass lockdown) [1].

It seemed like a good idea at the time we did this, but I think we can
do better. Ideally, what I like is the following

 o  Remove all storage.policy.* and volume.policy.* properties. It
    shouldn't be in hal

 o  Move all policy into a ''policy mount wrapper'' a'la pmount, let's
    just call it hmount for the time being :-). I'm not attached to
    what it is called

 o  hmount has a well defined programmatic interface (since we may
    have different implementations for KDE and GNOME)

 o  hmount reads policy from gconf (on GNOME) or KConfig (on KDE) - this
    is mostly such that it's easy to lock down and it's easy to write
    UI to reconfigure policy. 

    Here are some common things the UI should support 

    - Specify mount point to use / mount options / whether to mount
      read only (for lock down). Use the HAL UDI as the unique key.
      Suggest to, for GNOME, integrate this UI upstream in Nautilus.

    - Specify whether the volume/drive should be visible to the user
      at all: (a) it may be too risky to show e.g. partitions on the
      fixed IDE drive since fs detection is a risky; (b) in the data
      center we don't want to show SCSI drives stemming from e.g 
      Fibre Channel [2]

 o  hmount should pop up a notification bubble / dialog if mounting
    read-only and ask if the user wants to authorize for mounting
    read-write.

I've copied utopia-list gnome org and pmount developer Martin Pitt to
hear whether he is interested in collaborating on this. I certainly
think this is something worth fixing upstream.

Cheers,
David

[1] : OK, so lock down is controversial. Suffice to say, some enterprise
users wants this and I can imagine it's useful in libraries etc. Also
see this article

 http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20040916.html

and search for epoxy.

[2] : Actually, once I had a bug for a Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 beta
regarding more than 100 icons showing up on the GNOME desktop :-)