Interaction multiple distro installs, fstab-sync, and konqueror

[Enrique Perez-Terron]

Hello,

In the newdgroup comp.os.linux.misc there was recently a thread started
by a relatively newbie, who had installed Mandrivia/Mandrake, then Suse
in a different partiton.  Back in Mandrake he browsed the devices in
Konqueror and clicked on /dev/hda13, which he knew contained the suse
root partition.  Konqueror mounted the partition over /.  Guess what
more happened.  Hint: X has a unix-domain socket in /tmp/.X11-unix.

He had noticed that the new partitions had appeared automatically in
/etc/fstab in the Mandrake partition.  He did not remember many details.
The new partition had "/" as the mount point.  He soon after wiped the
partitions and started over with just Suse, so I cannot repeat or
confirm any details.

I believe this string "/" came from the file system label.

Is this a known problem?  Who should be shot?  You hal guys?  Mandrake?
Hotplug?  Konqueror?  All of us?  Nobody?  I mean, do anyone of you have
ideas concerning the coordination and the division of labor and
responsibilities, and how this can best be safeguarded against?

I don't even know for sure hal was involved in the mishap.  Nevertheless,
the coordination issue is interesting.  Without very strong arguments to
show for me, I "feel" the most questionable part of the chain of events,
or the point where a sanity check could most reasonably be demanded, is
when the decision to enter "/" in /etc/fstab was taken.  One could also
blame the SuSE installation program that entered "/" as a filesystem
label, supposing that the mandrake filesystem also had an identical file
system label.  I don't know if that was the case.  Given that people can
move disks from a computer to another, the label of a new file system
should not blindly be put in /etc/fstab. But I don't know how this
mechanism works, if hal makes that decision, or just provides the tool to
do it for some (mandrake? hotpug?) script to do it.

One could also blame Konqueror, but I can easily imagine the
consternation among Konqueror programmers if they cannot rely on
/etc/fstab to contain reasonable information.

Any thoughts?

-Enrique