ntfs volumes and locale= option

[Michael Biebl]

Hi,

a Debian user reported that mounting ntfs volumes fails for him under KDE [1].

After investigating this problem, the following issues were found:
20-storage-methods.fdi contains:

      <match key="volume.fstype" string="ntfs">
        <match key="/org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/computer:system.kernel.name"
string="Linux">
          <append key="volume.mount.valid_options" type="strlist">uid=</append>
          <append key="volume.mount.valid_options" type="strlist">gid=</append>
          <append key="volume.mount.valid_options"
type="strlist">umask=</append>
          <append key="volume.mount.valid_options"
type="strlist">locale=</append>
          <append key="volume.mount.valid_options" type="strlist">utf8</append>
        </match>
...

The locale option was added in
a372bf79e16a5c6c00d0e262745dc935de364ca2, as response to
https://launchpad.net/bugs/78370.

There are three NTFS drivers I know of:
1.) in-kernel ntfs
2.) ntfs-fuse (ntfsprogs)
3.) ntfs-3g

Only ntfs-fuse and ntfs-3g support the locale= option, the kernel
driver doesn't.

Distributions and desktop environments handle this situation differently.

gnome-mount (GNOME) by default uses fstype=ntfs-3g.
This means, mounting ntfs volumes fails if the ntfs-3g package is not
installed. But as it uses ntfs-3g it doesn't hit the locale= problem.

KDE does not explicitely set the fstype.
That means, mounting ntfs volumes from within KDE fails.

Some distros (afaik Fedora/Ubuntu) install ntfs-3g by default and
create a symlink /sbin/mount.ntfs to ntfs-3g, which means that
mounting ntfs volumes works, as long as you don't uninstall ntfs-3g.
Using the in-kernel ntfs driver doesn't work on those distros, neither.

A third workaround exists, that uses ntfs-config, which creates a fdi
file that set fstype to ntfs-3g.


Imo, all those approaches have downsides and I'm wondering what the
best fix would look like.

a.) should the locale= option be only allowed for fstype ntfs-3g?
b.) should be locale= option be provided by a fdi shipped within the
ntfs-3g package?
b.) should KDE explicitely ask hal to use the ntfs3-g fstype, as
gnome-mount does?

Other ideas, comments?

Michael

[1] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=497463
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