Hal and fuse filesystem support

[David Zeuthen]

On Tue, 2006-10-03 at 17:51 +0200, Florent Mertens wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I'm actually thinking on a way to integrate ntfs-3g in the gnome desktop
> to be able to use it as default in the future, and so i have some
> questions to ask you.
> For those who don't know it yet, ntfs-3g is an ntfs driver based on
> ntfsmount which provide full read/write support to any ntfs partition.
> To make it more secure, it use the fuse interface, and so is in fact a
> virtual filesystem.
> And here is the problem. Because it's a virtual filesystem, hal don't
> match it with an existant partition (different block.major &
> block.minor) and so set the ntfs partition mounted with fuse to unmount.
> Gnome-vfs apparently check mtab & hal to create volume.
> When hal is disable, checking only in mtab work and it create a volume,
> but when hal is enable, because the partition found in mtab is set to
> unmount in hal, it don't create volume, leaving the impression that the
> partition is unmounted (even if it's not the case).

Think this was fixed with this commit

 http://gitweb.freedesktop.org/?p=hal.git;a=commit;h=2ea340399bf8cf3d2bb6bd1b5c4ecbc2042e93d4

It works for me with gnome-mount

 http://people.freedesktop.org/~david/gnome-mount-ntfs-fuse.png

as you can see, but we need to pass the right mount options so it's
readable by the user - do you know what mount options are good to pass
so the user can read/write to the NTFS partition? 

Please let me know so I can add the right bits to the hal property
volume.mount.valid_options, cf. 

 http://gitweb.freedesktop.org/?p=hal.git;a=blob;hb=HEAD;f=fdi/policy/10osvendor/20-storage-methods.fdi

since we gotta be a bit careful about what we allow.

> I aleady send an email to the gnome-vfs guy to know if it's possible to
> disable the hal check for fuse fs and what they think about that. But an
> other implementation could be to make hal recognize the fuse filesystem,
> and make the match with existant hal partitions by an other way than
> with block.major & block.minor, and those to be able to set it to
> mounted.
> 
> I wanted to know what you think about that, and if you think that it's
> better to do the job in hal or in gnome-vfs (and of course if you think
> it's a hal problem, if you could do it ;) )?

No need to do custom hacks in gnome-vfs. The user should be able to do
this through hal and their mount frontend (e.g. gnome-mount, KDE stuff)
of choice.

     David