fdi/policy/10osvendor/10-storage-policy.fdi : storage.policy.should_mount

[David Zeuthen]

On Sat, 2005-10-15 at 23:49 +0100, Richard Hughes wrote:
> In reference to the file fdi/policy/10osvendor/10-storage-policy.fdi, we
> have *by default* to not mount fixed disks.
> 
> Talking to people in the community, i.e. new users, they are still
> struggling with the mount /dev/sda2 /mnt syntax to mount a simple fixed
> disk when they really needn't be!

I've been advocating, for some time actually, to simply stop using
the /etc/fstab file, much like pmount does, see this

 http://blog.fubar.dk/?p=58

for details as well as some discussion on utopia-list. Most of this is
already implemented, so and so, see the /system/storage keys that
gnome-vfs uses. All that is missing is a program like pmount that reads
settings from the users session, e.g. gconf in GNOME

Of course, since GNOME, KDE and other desktops cannot decide on a shared
configuration system, we'd have to have one for GNOME, one for KDE and
so forth :-)

The very key thing I've learned is that you want to push all policy
decisions up to the layer that is the UI desktop session - such that you
can read the users settings and interact with him. You certainly don't
want it [policy decision] at the system-level like our
10-storage-policy.fdi does - just look at the volume of confusion this
has caused. 

It's alright for HAL to export the mechanism to enforce policy, but it's
not alright to hardcode the policy in a file like that.

> Is it still valid (and sensible) to not mount fixed disks?
> 
> The first thing I do when I reinstall HAL is to edit this file and
> change the value to true, so that it gets my FAT32 fixed disk in the
> GNOME "Computer".
> 
> If the comment is still valid, then can we somehow blacklist the wrong
> IDE RAID controllers? Create a tag storage.raid? Seems a shame to have
> this disabled by default.

Not really. Early betas of RHEL4 gave me feedback from partners where
they literally had hundreds and hundres of volume icons on their desktop
because we added entries for fixed disks and those were mounted. Yes,
the partner had a huge number of disks attached.

Cheers,
David