Re: A proposal on intelligent mounting

[Michael Poole <poole graviton res cmu edu>]

Richard Hestilow <hestgray@ionet.net> writes:

> I had an interesting idea for a rather transparent mounting/unmounting of
> floppies, cdroms, etc. On mc, and the recently proposed GnomeFileSelector,
> there could be special choices for "Floppy", "CDRom", and other removeable
> media. When you select one of these, it sends a notification via CORBA to a
> removable media server (or whatever), which checks the mount status. If it has
> already been mounted, it just accesses the directory it has been mounted at.
> If it hasn't been mounted, it mounts it. When the program is done using the
> floppy, it sends another notice telling the server its done. When there are
> no programs using the floppy/cdrom, it unmounts it. Also, if feasible, it
> would be really helpful to have auto-detection of filesystem types.
> 
> "What do you think, sirs?" :-)

How is this not better solved (and with less overhead, and without relying
on the accessing process being GNOMEified) by an automounter such as autofs
or amd?  Both of those can be pretty smart about what/how to mount things.

-- Michael