Hal and autofs.

[Stef Bon]

Hi,

as I've described in a previous mail ( 
http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/hal/2009-April/013208.html )
I think that cooperation with autofs is a good idea.

In the configuration it should be a choice to make the automounter do 
the mounting (which is good at it), or do it the way the're handled at 
this moment.

Futher, and here I've been working on a construction for that, mounting 
should be done in a subdirectory of the users homedirectory, not on a 
"foreign" place like /media. Make users work and understand on a 
Linuxmachine requires a workable environment. Central place where all 
the things an ordinary user is working on, is the users homedirectory. 
So this also counts for the dynamically added mountpoints.

My construction, in short creates a "Connections" map in the 
homedirectory, where, after login, two mountpoints are added to the 
automounter maps, one for access to the network, another for access to 
local devices (or media as you like):

/home/sbon/Connections/Media
                                          Network

To achieve this with hal, hal should parse device information to the 
automounter (device uuid, label, mountoptions), as well as the users 
which are active on the system, which should have access to this device 
and have a homedirectory. This is not so hard, only autofs should have 
an interface to dbus. Autofs should inform other systems via dbus the 
device is mounted or not...

For a normal system (desktop) normally there is only one user. Only on 
multisession system like an NX server, multiseat and Xen, there are more 
users for which this device should be available.

What do you think?? I'm not a maintainer of autofs, I'm just working 
with autofs and having this idea.

Looking forward to your reaction,

Stef Bon
the Netherlands