udisks and eSATA: a question about the meaning of "detachable"

[David Zeuthen]

Hi,

On Mon, Jul 11, 2011 at 9:41 PM, Phillip Susi <psusi at cfl.rr.com> wrote:
> And how are they supposed to determine that?

By default nothing happens - as I said, the feature is mainly there
for hobbyists.

> At the end of the day, you either need to decide if you want to auto
> mount new, unrecognized filesystems, and either do so or do not.  Trying
> to guess when the user might want to or not based on how it is connected
> just isn't workable.
>
> How about when udisks sees a new uncrecognized disk, why not ask the
> user what they want to do with it.  It could be a 4 way choice: auto
> mount it, do not auto mount it, mount it just this once, or do nothing.
>  The first two choices would save an entry in /etc/fstab with the auto
> and noauto options respectively so you would know what to do next time
> without prompting.

I don't think this is a good idea because interrupting the user with
highly technical questions like that never really works. So that's not
going to work. There's also the problem that distros typically require
admin authentication in order to modify things like /etc/fstab.

I think the only workable solution is that the user interface simply
doesn't expose whether a device with mountable filesystem is actually
mounted or not - some sort of clever mount-on-demand thing.
Unfortunately POSIX doesn't really make this easy but it could be made
to work by using either autofs (same way systemd does it) or through
clever use of GIO/GVfs.

    David