HAL wiki faq: how to automount hotpluggable devices

[Remco Treffkorn]

The FAQ asks the question:

"How to mount a specific storage device to a specific mountpoint using fdi 
files Answer welcome ;)"

There is no answer.

My general problem is: I would like to plug in a USB stick (with or without 
partition table) and have the filesystems mounted under /media.

I spent about 5 days looking and playing. I found many wrong approaches using 
UDEV rules, ivman, pmount, and gnome-volume-manager. The documentation I 
found seems all a bit outdated.

Here is my current understanding of how it works:

Hal learns from udev that a device showed up. Hal does all the magic, finding 
out about partions, filesystems and such. It then tells anybody listening, 
that volumes are available for mounting.

Here it gets a bit murky. It seems that in the past it was the applications 
responsibility to do the actual mounting, but I have the feeling that has 
changed, or at least is not the only way it can be done. (Does anybody even 
remember fstab-sync ?)

The existence of .hal-mtab in /media seems to suggest that hal itself can do 
the mounting if asked to (via the Mount() method?).

Could somebody in the know please summarize how an application listening on 
dbus can cause hal to mount/unmount volumes?

Is there a way to have a policy .fdi that does the mounting/unmounting without 
third party involvement?

This is for an embedded application without any desktop managers involved.

Cheers,
Remco

-- 
Remco Treffkorn (RT445)
HAM DC2XT
remco at rvt.com   (831) 685-1201