[Utopia] is there a security spec that is above MIME etc

[David Zeuthen]

On Sun, 2004-08-29 at 11:30 -0500, Jerry Haltom wrote:
> Oh. I wasn't aware this program was doing that.
> 

See 

 http://freedesktop.org/~david/hal-spec/hal-spec.html#ov_hal_linux26
 (need to export the latest version, s/update-fstab.sh/fstab-sync/)

> Huh. I don't like that. At all. That should be part of the installation
> procedure for the card reader or device.
> 

Huh, so do you expect people to install software just to use a USB
thumbdrive? (Note also that the device file may change (e.g. /dev/sda1
one day, /dev/sdb1 another day) unless you do groovy stuff like create
udev rules)

Second, /etc/fstab is traditionally used to list available filesystems,
that's an old UNIX tradition; tons of software depends on it including
KDE and GNOME. (sure, they also use /etc/mtab but then you need root to
mount the device and this is just bad for several reasons)

Finally, the /etc/fstab can be updated atomically; some distributions
have used software to modify it for several years (e.g. updfstab on Red
Hat systems).

Hope this helps,
David