automount ntfs volumes (was ntfs volume and locale= option)

[Szabolcs Szakacsits]

Hi,

Danny Kukawka <danny.kukawka <at> web.de> writes:
> On Samstag 4. Oktober 2008, Michael Biebl wrote:
> > a Debian user reported that mounting ntfs volumes fails for him 
> > under KDE [1]. After investigating this problem, the following 
> > issues were found:

Thank you Michael for taking care about this issue. Your summary was
one of the nicest and cleanest I've ever read.

The locale= mount option is relatively a minor issue because there 
are over 70 other ones which users may want to use and can cause the 
same problem.

The real issue is how NTFS automount should work. This became one of 
our (NTFS-3G) top priorities for a while because it's indeed a big 
mess for two years, and it's only getting worse.

The NTFS-3G developers' policy was that we do not force what NTFS 
driver is used and how it is used. This is also explained as the top 
most often asked problem: http://ntfs-3g.org/support.html#plugandplay

In June we invested a lot of time and enery to research and solve 
this issue but sadly with no result yet. Originally we believed that 
HAL should provide the needed configuration, as it does for any other 
file systems.

Danny kindly explained to us that this is not OK because NTFS-3G is 
not a kernel file system driver. This is true because it's indeed a 
hybrid, split kernel/user space driver but otherwise it exactly 
behaves as any other in-kernel file system driver.

The only real difference is that while automount works smoothly 
for the other file systems, it's a total user and distro developer 
disaster and confusion for those who would like to use NTFS-3G
(at the moment over 180 distributions, most of the top 100 most
popular ones: http://ntfs-3g.org/distributions.html).

We planned to provide the HAL .fdi file in the NTFS package and 
collected the requirements. The issue became very complicated 
because whatever we designed, it was either broken in some popular 
system or it got broken later on by HAL upgrades. 

We sent to Danny some emails asking his help and advice but sadly 
we never got reply to the above emails how we could solve these 
problems:

 http://ntfs-3g.org/misc/ntfs-hal-2008-06-12.txt
 http://ntfs-3g.org/misc/ntfs-hal-2008-06-17.txt
 http://ntfs-3g.org/misc/ntfs-hal-2008-06-29.txt

Our conclusion was that either HAL should provide the config because
it's the only one which knows its internal changes, so it can keep 
compatibility and consistency with itself, or some other type of
automount should be used.

We would gladly do whatever is needed to support smooth automount 
but we got completely stuck how this could be achieved without direct 
HAL support.

> > b.) should be locale= option be provided by a fdi shipped within the
> > ntfs-3g package?
> 
> Also yes. 

Please see http://ntfs-3g.org/misc/ntfs-hal-2008-06-12.txt

We would have done it long ago if this would be sanely feasible.

> Always the package that introduce something new, which isn't part of 
> the basic system (as e.g. libmtp for supported MTP devices) should deliver 
> their own fdi files to provide correct policies and behavior.

NTFS-3G is part of the basic system for many distros. Due to lack of
HAL support, all of them invent its own workarounds which keep get
broken by HAL upgrades and other workarounds. 

> > Other ideas, comments?
> 
> I'm not sure if overwriting the fstype in HAL (as ntfs-3g apparently do) 

NTFS-3G doesn't do anything with HAL: no fdi file, no modification 
anywhere, etc. It just installs the driver binary and the 
/sbin/mount.ntfs-3g mount helper. 

Best regards,  Saka

--
NTFS-3G: http://ntfs-3g.org