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

[David Zeuthen]

Hi,

On Tue, Jul 12, 2011 at 4:57 PM, Phillip Susi <psusi at cfl.rr.com> wrote:
> I would think that a server admin in such a comparatively VERY rare setup
> could be bothered to change the system policy to disable automount

It's not necessarily something that happens a lot but it happens
frequently enough to warrant being careful. And while it's nice to
just hand-wave "oh, you should have turned off the automounter" or
"you shouldn't have logged into GNOME", experience (specifically I've
dealt with enterprise customers and partners here at RH) shows that
it's just not very useful for either party.

In general, it's bad form to require a bunch of configuration before a
system can be used - it's almost always much better to go for a policy
that works out of the box for 99% and allow the last 1% to override
for where the policy doesn't work. Hence, only automount devices on a
small whitelist but allow vendor/site/user overrides through
UDISKS_AUTOMOUNT_HINT. It's just good engineering to do it this way.

Either way, I'm not sure what you problem you are trying to solve or
how you think things are broken. As I said, the current setup works
well for usb/firewire/flash/optical media so the only thing consumers
use (and we don't automount) is eSATA / SATA (and I guess not that
many people use eSATA after all). But if you think about it, people
rarely leave photos on SATA disks or other things that would cause the
automounter to prompt. And even for such situations the user will a
cluebar as seen in

 http://people.freedesktop.org/~david/nautilus-autorun-without-automount.png

when they try to access the device.

    David