Thoughts about HAL, Ivman and Pmount.

[Artem Kachitchkine]

> since if two users are running ivman at the same time there will
> be big trouble when both tries to mount the same thing under /media.
> There will be a war about who owns the mountpoint.

I think a device ownership policy should assign ownership for each 
device to users or groups of users. Such a policy should be external to 
HAL and volume managers. A trivial example of such policy is: whoever 
owns console also owns removable media. Obviously, this policy is not 
particularly multiuser-friendly (mufy), although it probably works okay 
in the special case of fast user switching. This should be fixed by a 
mufy ownership policy and a mufy volume manager. I'm working on a HAL 
extension to make this easier to implement, but that's just one piece of 
the puzzle.

> Therefore I have made a patch for pmount that lets any user who's in the
> same group as specified by the gid= mount option unmount a device:
> http://kymatica.com/stuff/pmount-0.9.3-lijon.patch

IMHO hardcoding this into pmount is not the way to go. At the very 
least, this should be configurable.

> The syntax of ivmans config files is kind of limited in
> many ways, while .fdi files seems to be very flexible.

It's kind of a stretch to compare these two. HAL is a system-wide 
service with system-wide settings. Volume managers such as g-v-m and 
ivman are user applications with per-user settings. It goes back to the 
old discussion that storage.policy should be moved out of HAL. David, do 
you still think it's a good idea? I think it's the right thing to do.

> How would I set up hald to do the automounting

HAL is not supposed to mount volumes. I for one would be disappointed if 
  it does.

Overall, it's not quite clear what is the exact problem you're trying to 
solve.

-Artem.