better mount options for usb storage devices

[Nelson Benítez]

El dom, 12-06-2005 a las 12:00 +0400, Andrey Borzenkov escribió:
> On Wednesday 08 June 2005 23:56, Nelson Benítez wrote:
> > Hello, I have an usb pendrive where i have files stored from windows xp,
> > my pendrive always failed to mount automatically via hal, after a bit
> > researching I could finally mount it by adding the following two mount
> > options to the fstab line:
> > codepage=850,iocharset=utf8
> >
> 
> this is not limited to USB. Most other external filesystems need this too 
> (iso9660, udf, (v)fat, ntfs to name the most popular)
> 
> [...]
> >
> > So I send this mail to help improve this because this kind of stuff (usb
> > storage devices) are expected to just works (tm)... the iocharset option
> > could be added to 90defaultpolicy/storage-policy.fdi but the codepage
> > option seems to be country/charset specific so in this case hal would
> > have to figure it out from $LANG or locale I think...
> >
> 
> 
> This is what Mandrake currently does. When you set locale it adds HAL locale 
> policy.
> 
> Actually it is iocharset that is LANG specific - it defines local encoding. 

But I think setting iocharset to utf8 is a good default as it is used in
windows XP and modern linux distributions and will catch most
languages... 

> codepage (when supported by filesystem) is completely external to Linux and 
> there is no way to reliably find it out - you may only guess.
> 

 and how does windows guess it ?
 I think codepage codes corresponds to similar iso charsets, so finding
the locale iso charset, or just the country, we could use a codepage
code to that country... so in my case hal would have seen that my $LANG
is "es_ES" and use codepage 850 for spain, if is "en_US" use 437 and so
on...

> I do not think it is HAL reponsibility. Your patch will force everything to 
> speific codepage/local encoding but there is no reason to believe it is 
> correct for everyone. Locale policy should be created by system administrator 
> or configuration tools according to local preference. 

Im not an expert and probably what I say in this email is wrong, but the
main thing that bothers me is how this just worked in windows and not in
linux, but maybe, as you say, my distro (gentoo) has not created a good
policy for this, so I will test this with latest distro versions
(mandrake,fedora,suse..) to see how it goes...


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