Re: [Fwd: Re: here i come !]

[Thomas Vander Stichele <thomas urgent rug ac be>]

On 24 Jun 2002, Miles Lane wrote:

> On Mon, 2002-06-24 at 11:17, Seth Nickell wrote:
> > This is exactly the obscure sort of technical choice we *shouldn't*
> > present if we are really targeting home users. There are options
> > though... For example, what about having a low battery mode that mounts
> > the filesystem as ext2 (you can mount ext3 filesystems as ext2 as far as
> > I understand, right?). Things like that that end up being transparent.
> 
> Yes, I was thinking of suggesting this as well.
> An even better solution, though, might be to 
> ask the kernel developers to add a boot-time detection
> where, if APM or ACPI is enabled and the machine is
> running off of a battery, automatically mount EXT3
> partitions with EXT2.  I'll ask whether this sounds 
> like a workable solution on LKML.  I'm not sure
> whether such a change could go into the 2.4 series
> kernel.  It might be work only appropriate for 2.5.
> 
> It would be cool if there were a way to have the
> EXT3 partitions synced and then remounted with EXT2
> and vice versa.
> 
> Something like:  mount -o remount -t ext2 /dev/hda6 /
> 
> I tried this, but it remounts the partition with EXT3,
> in spite of my attempt to set the filesystem type.

Hm, to me all this seems like trying to second-guess users.  It shouldn't 
be behaving automatically unless you have given the user the chance to 
have it so.  IMO, I don't see what the problem is in a) detecting if it's 
a laptop and b) if it is, presenting the user with the choice between 
ext2/longer battery life and ext3/better crash recovery.  You could even 
remove the terms ext2 and ext3.

But detecting it at boot time doesn't seem like a good idea, in truth my 
laptop hasn't been rebooted for more than a week now that apm works right 
(and I learned of all the quirks - unmount your network drives before 
going to sleep when planning to move to a different network and all that 
;)).

And changing ext2/ext3 on the fly sounds cool but will get messy in 
practice.  I still feel more for letting the user choose either through a 
dialog, both at install time and during run time.  And fancy autodetection 
stuff could be built on top of that.

On another note, if we don't have a PR man yet, and since people join the 
list by proposition of others, I propose we invite Christian Schaller as 
our PR man.  Every project should have one like him - the stuff he does 
for GStreamer is just simply amazing.

Thomas

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