HAL methods at storage device level, to mount/unmount/eject volumes

[Kevin Ottens]

Le Lundi 12 Décembre 2005 18:58, Kay Sievers a écrit :
> Well what's wrong with having it? It's a user policy if you want to use
> fuse or subfs and not a system-wide config option. It should even be
> possible to configure that policy in the user session for specific devices.
> The mount script is not supposed to look-up data in the user session,
> right?

Ah ok! That's the crux of the matter. You're trying to turn something that 
used to be a system-wide policy into a user-wide policy.

In my opinion we have currently two aspects covered by this "fstype" 
parameter.

1) "soft mounting" vs "hard mounting" (I'm not sure the terms are adequate, 
basically I mean using subfs and friends or not).
I'm not sure it's particularly useful to give the user the possibility to 
choose himself, but after all why not, some power users might love this 
feature. But, I'm pretty sure that having to pass "subfs" is the wrong way to 
do it. Since Mandriva uses "supermount" for example you'll end up patching 
applications depending what your distro promotes...

2) Choosing a particular driver to handle a filesystem (for example "ntfs" vs 
"ntfs-fuse").
That's the wrong thing to do IMHO. Why the hell the user should choose between 
ntfs or captive? That looks like something that should be decided at the 
system level, and by the distributor.

Hence why I'd prefer to see a compromise implemented. Instead of a "fstype" 
parameter, just keep a flag indicating if we want to use "soft mounting" or 
not. This way it'll have a clearer semantic, and we won't have to deal with 
the fact that Suse uses subfs and Mandriva uses supermount... We can use only 
the *mount thingie given by the distro anyway.

The only remaining issue I could forsee is how could we know that a volume is 
soft mountable? and soft mounted?
I'm far from being sure, but maybe adding volume.is_soft_mounted and 
volume.is_soft_mountable keys would make sense...

Regards.
-- 
Kévin 'ervin' Ottens, http://ervin.ipsquad.net
"Ni le maître sans disciple, Ni le disciple sans maître,
Ne font reculer l'ignorance."
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