eSATA auto mounting

[Kay Sievers]

On Mon, Jun 13, 2011 at 18:01, David Zeuthen <zeuthen at gmail.com> wrote:
> By not having things like the SystemInternal property, we nicely
> sidestep all these problems and our software becomes easier to write,
> maintain and use. And more importantly, it becomes easier to debug.
> And it reduces pressure on support channels (e.g. the corporate
> helpdesk or the son of the user). Less _is_ more.
>
> Btw, there are plans to introduce a UDISKS_AUTOMOUNT_HINT variable
> that can assume the values 'always' and 'never' and make the desktop
> automounter use that variable (and of course have it documented in
> udisks(7), cf http://hal.freedesktop.org/docs/udisks/udisks.7.html ).
> This way you can simply write an udev rule that sets this - you may
> even write a small program that looks at the AHCI registers for this -
> or it could look at the phase of the moon or whatever you want.

I agree with all of that, and I'm absolutely for getting rid of the
guesswork at the system service level we do. The future will bring us
buses, connectors, virtualizations which will blur these lines even
more, and likely provide us with even more wrong information about
them.

After all the years we tried, I think, we can just state today, that
any hardware-derived idea of internal/external, removable/fixed, and
setting system policy that way, will just not work reliably in the
real world.

Kay