magicdev and non-CD devices

[Ryan Warner <chipkids yahoo com>]

After much searching I find that magicdev is the
little beast that automounts my CDs and puts icons on
my desktop.  Due to the absence of documentation it is
difficult to discover if this tool is configurable, or
extendable or what not.  But, the verdict appears to
be it works for CDs (and DVDs) only.

While on the newsgroups this tool appears to give a
certain group of people heartburn, I personally like
it.  Although it's implementation leaves a lot to be
desired.  Ignoring the implementation side of things
though...

Can/could magicdev be used to mount and display icons
for other devices like my zip drive or compact flash? 
In other words, any removable media.

The current state doesn't seem ideal, but any ideas on
accomplishing cleanly accomplishing this today.
(magicdev or otherwise)

<MY VISION OF THE WAY THINGS SHOULD BE BEGINS HERE>

On the implementation side.  I haven't been able to
figure out how magicdev works, (I'm not a source code
hacker) but I've seen posts to the effect that it
periodically polls the drive or receices
signals/events from the kernel or both.  Not sure
there is a good way to tell what's going on.  Polling
sounds like a bad kludge though, so I hope that's not
happening.

Either way, something more sophisticated to handle the
general case would be best.  The general case would
be, anytime media is inserted or removed or eject is
pressed, or hotplugable hardware is connected or
removed, the appropriate kernel module
(scsi/ide/usb/ieee1394/etc) should talk to some
centralized kernel feature that tracks this sort of
event.  A user mode program should then be registered
with the kernel that says "Hey kernel! Wake me up when
something gets added or removed.  Be is CD, DVD, flash
card, printer, camera, pda, game controller, whatever,
anything that is (easily) removeable."

That user mode program could then handle things like
(un)mounting disks, or calling hot-sync software, or
whatever.  Right now these facilities seem to be
scattered over several different tools.  magicdev,
hotplug, automounter.  When conceptually they're doing
the same basic thing.  Adding or removing hardware to
the system.

Since I'm basically specing my vision of things, I
might as well finish it off.  Keeping with the spirit
of unix there should be control and configurability of
this.  So, this tool should be configurable and
limitable based on any number of features including,
device, user, group, and terminal logged in on.  The
terminal one being the most interesting to me.  You
should be able to configure certain devices to be tied
to a terminal, and restrict access to the device to
the user logged into that terminal.  This preserves
the ability for the person in phsycial control of the
device, to maintain who as access to it once it's
plugged into the computer on a multi-user system. 
Even if they are not a priveledged user that can't
control the configuration of the computer.

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