fstab-sync

[John (J5) Palmieri]

On Thu, 2004-07-15 at 22:23 +0200, David Zeuthen wrote:
> On Thu, 2004-07-15 at 04:24 -0400, Ray Strode wrote:
> > Hi,
> > 
> > One of the projects I've been working on over the last week or so with
> > John Palmieri is getting auto mounting of devices with HAL and gnome-
> > volume-manager to work for Fedora.  
> 
> Cool.
> 
> > One piece of the puzzle was to write
> > a replacement for fstab-update.sh in C that generates nicer mount point
> > names and is a little more robust.
> > 
> 
> Yay, it feels more right to write it in C when we're messing with such
> an important file :-)
> 
> > I've put the result of this work up:
> > 
> > http://people.redhat.com/~rstrode/fstab-sync-07-14-2004.patch
> > 
> 
> OK, I just had a look at your updated patch.
> 
> > The code hasn't seen much testing, so it probably has quite a few bugs,
> > but it seems to work for me (I've tested it with two different usb
> > flash drives, cd's, cdr's, and cdrw's)
> > 
> > Note the updfstab program that comes with kudzu may not play nice with
> > this program, so if you have that program installed and hotplug is
> > currently calling it directly, be sure to turn that off.  Also, it's
> > probably not too good of an idea to configure HAL to callout both fstab-
> > update.sh and this new program.
> 
> A few observations:
> 
> 1. I had to write a small wrapper, see [1], to use it; is this intended?
> It would be nice if we could just symlink to the installed binary.
> 
> 2. The program put /dev/hda1 into my fstab but that one is already there
> as LABEL=/. This can be resolved by looking at the volume.label for the
> volume you are processing.

We were discussing this.  Problem being that how do you determine which
disk is which when there are more than one partition labeled with "/"?

> 
> 3. There is an entry for my cd-rom drive only when I've got a disc in
> the drive; this breaks the current hal patch for gnome-vfs (though when
> J5's changes are in this should no longer be required).

First part of the patch was committed.  Now I need to hook up hal.

> However, I think that for removable storage without partition tables it
> makes sense to have the fstab entry anyway; you can check this when
> processing a hal-device where both block.no_partitions is TRUE and
> block.is_volume is FALSE. 
>
> This applies to cdrom, floppy, ls120, zip and other funny drives (I
> haven't tested it on a zipdrive though, haven't got one yet). It would
> be cool to choose the <name> in /media/<name> after the type or
> capabilities of the drive; e.g. if I have a CD-ROM and a DVD-RW I would
> get /media/cdrom and /media/dvdrw. You can use information in the
> storage.cdrom.* capabilities for this. Also, check out gnome-vfs-hal-
> mounts.c in gnome-vfs for how the desktop visible name is computed.
> 
> 4. Mounting from the program doesn't seem very useful; as hald runs as
> root it means that the desktop session won't have write privileges and
> you need to drop to a root shell to unmount the volume.

I agree here also.

> 5. The program uses the kudzu option to recognize entries made by the
> program, perhaps this should be 'hal' instead? If think it could be
> useful to host this program with the hal package as it's not Fedora
> specific? If we do this we should probably use the 'hal' option and also
> host the (trivial) patch to mount that achieves this as well.

A mail went out to the upstream mount maintainer.  He agreed to accept
the no-op "managed" so I think we will go in this direction instead of
making it hal specific.  If we feel we need to be more specific we can
always add a comment to the end like #hal managed.

-- 
John (J5) Palmieri
Associate Software Engineer
Desktop Group
Red Hat, Inc.
Blog: http://martianrock.com

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