On Sat, Feb 11, 2006 at 10:29:06AM +0100, Henne Vogelsang wrote:

http://lists.opensuse.org/archive/opensuse-factory/2006-Jan/0153.html

What I don't get is one person says it is usable with Gnome, KDE and everything and then sombody else says, it is not usable with KDE. If Ubuntu uses it, most likely Kubuntu uses it and that is KDE. houghi -- Paradise is exactly like where you are right now ... only much, much better. -- Laurie Anderson

On Sat, 11 Feb 2006, Thomas Hertweck wrote:

I know quite a lot of people (including myself) who don't like any automatic mounting at all! It might be a nice feature for beginners or newbies with previous experiences of the Windows world, and I am sure that there are also many other Linux users out there who think that this is a good feature - however, there are also other people around and one should never forget this fact (even SuSE has a bit of humour when you look at the Makefile of subfs: "Makefile for the SuSE Windows XP subfs filesystem routines", SuSE 9.2 kernel source).

I have to agree totally with this. I hate auto mounting.

Unfortunately, with every new SuSE version it gets more complicated to get rid of all that (from my point of view) unnecessary and unwanted stuff. Don't misunderstand me, I do not propose to avoid having any automatic mounting mechanism in SuSE, but one should at least be able to easily deactivate it and to use the traditional way of mounting. I would really appreciate (and surely many other people as well) if this could be considered as some sort of boundary condition for any new mechanism that is included in the distribution...

Thanks for listening and greetings from London,

Please this is very important to me as well. Greetings from Salt Lake City. -- Boyd Gerber ZENEZ 1042 East Fort Union #135, Midvale Utah 84047

houghi wrote:

[...] I agree with the part that automounting should be easy to be disabled. The standard however should be enabled and for all configurations, not only KDE or Gnome.

From my point of view, the standard should be the traditional way of mounting filesystems in a UNIX environment - it's SUSE Linux not SUSE Windows XP, and far too many companies just try to make Linux a "better" Windows clone (this is a general remark and not particularly targeted at SUSE). That is (again from my point of view) the wrong way to go and should not be a primary goal! Linux might and should pick up good ideas from other OS, but it should not just clone all features without checking their usefulness. Linux should remain Linux and not try to become a better version of another OS...

However, coming back to a realistic point of view and considering the target group of the SUSE Linux distribution, an automount mechanism should be implemented and enabled by default. Nevertheless, it must satisfy certain conditions: - it should be easy to disable the mechanism and mount any filesystem (whether it's on a hard disk, USB stick, etc. etc.) in the traditional way. - it should not come along with severe drawbacks like mounting with the "sync" Option. As any automatic mount procedure (where you can, e.g., just unplug a USB stick) and asynchronous write operations (which give the best performance) are mutually exclusive, I am not sure how this will be handled in future. Even Windows systems have a way to manually(!) "umount" an external USB device (e.g., an external hard disk). I would like to have a stable and well performing Linux system and that should not be sacrificed by an automount mechanism! - the dependencies must be handled in a proper way. I don't want to install lots of software related to automounting on my server only to satisfy RPM dependencies, although I am not going to use an automount mechanism on that machine. - the automount feature must be easy to configure and it must be documented. From my point of view, HAL, udev, and subfs etc. really lack proper documentation and are a nightmare when we consider the configuration. If a user (newbie?) must edit cryptic XML files just to make minor changes to the way these processes operate, then something is wrong. There might be other conditions, these just came to my mind... Have a nice Sunday! Thomas

jdd wrote:

[...] may I say that usually console only install are servers ones.

Automatic mounting has nothing to do with servers or the type of machine I am working on. My laptop is not a server, however I don't need any automount feature. Who says that I want to have immediate access to the content of a CD-ROM or USB stick after insertion/plugin? Who says I want everybody currently logged in on my desktop machine to have access to my CD-ROM after insertion of the CD? Remember, Linux is a multi-user system. Sometimes I just plug my USB stick in to avoid loosing the stick (they are almost too small nowadays ;-)) - then it's mounted, a window pops up, etc. Really annoying! If somebody wants to have all those "features", that's fine for me. But I must be able to turn it off easily!

[...] for usb stuff, manual mounting is nice is the mount point is easy to find, what is not the case for now (AFAIK). so make it simple or keep the usb automounting :-)

You're mixing two problems! Automounting and having persistent mount points are related topics, but not identical. http://portal.suse.com/sdb/en/2005/05/dkukawka_hal_mountpoints.html Cheers, Th.

On Sun, Feb 12, 2006 at 02:57:41PM +0100, jdd wrote:

As I understand, most users of graphical system prefere automounting (I don't, clicking on an icon was naot a problem for me :-) and the problem is only for console users.

Untrue. The problem is also there for e.g. WindowMaker, IceWM, Enlightment and other graphical enviroments.

I think automounting should not be default on console systems (for graphic systems, I would prefere it not be the default, but with no hope)

It should be wasy to be to disable, that I agree on. Having it enabled on one part and disabled on another _by default_ is not a wise choice. If it is a deamon, you could enable-disable it on a runlevel, so init 3 does not run it and init 5 does. houghi -- Stay away from hurricanes for a while.

My email was a follow-up email. This email was not meant to present a serious background for a discussion about the pros and cons of subfs etc. Please read my previous emails to understand the context. Quick summary: any future automount mechanism to be included in SUSE Linux is welcome and will be appreciated by many users - however, one should be able to easily switch it off and to use the traditional way of mounting filesystems as there are also many people around who don't like this automount "feature" at all. I think that is a realistic point of view. The following part should not be treated tooooo seriously: Adrian Schröter wrote:

Am Sunday 12 February 2006 14:10 schrieb Thomas Hertweck:

...

[...] Who says that I want to have immediate access to the content of a CD-ROM or USB stick after insertion/plugin?

Who says you(means the user) won't ?

I think, I (means the user) know much better than the computer what I want to do! When computers have reached such a level that they are able to predict exactly what I would like to do all the time, then it's time for mankind to surrender... ;-)

[...] classic /etc/fstab user entries do have the same problem.

No, because nothing is mounted automatically.

[...] Click on "No" the first time and it did never come back.

Can't test that anymore because suseplugger and things like that are always the first things to be disabled after installation... ;-) Cheers, Th.

Am Monday 13 February 2006 20:59 schrieb Thomas Hertweck:

My email was a follow-up email. This email was not meant to present a serious background for a discussion about the pros and cons of subfs etc. Please read my previous emails to understand the context. Quick summary: any future automount mechanism to be included in SUSE Linux is welcome and will be appreciated by many users - however, one should be able to easily switch it off and to use the traditional way of mounting filesystems as there are also many people around who don't like this automount "feature" at all. I think that is a realistic point of view.

The following part should not be treated tooooo seriously:

I just wanted to state that the standard-winers are usually wrong ;)

Adrian Schröter wrote:

...

Am Sunday 12 February 2006 14:10 schrieb Thomas Hertweck:

...

[...] Who says that I want to have immediate access to the content of a CD-ROM or USB stick after insertion/plugin?

Who says you(means the user) won't ?

I think, I (means the user) know much better than the computer what I want to do! When computers have reached such a level that they are able to predict exactly what I would like to do all the time, then it's time for mankind to surrender... ;-)

...

[...] classic /etc/fstab user entries do have the same problem.

No, because nothing is mounted automatically.

but everybody is allowed to do the mount. So you can't insert any media and be sure that only you can access it on a multiuser system -- Adrian Schroeter SUSE Linux Products GmbH, Maxfeldstr. 5, 90409 Nuernberg, Germany email: adrian@suse.de

John, first of all please learn how to quote email messages! So-called "top postings" are not well received on mailing lists... Just a (relatively ;-)) short answer because that topic seems to be "OT" on this mailing list: John Ahrends wrote:

This is NOT about making a widows clone. This is about making linux more usable by people who don't have the time or interest in becoming a LINUX guru.

I don't agree with you here. I can't see why, e.g., having a KDE icon to (manually) mount/umount filesystems should be much more complicated than other ways, and I don't think you need to be a Linux guru to click an icon. It's just different from what you are used to - but that does not necessarily mean it's worse. I have never seen any person who grew up with UNIX systems complaining about unusable systems. It's just different. It's the same with using xterms and the shell - most newbies and Windows users first don't like using the shell and shell scripts under Linux and prefer to have GUIs, even if it's just for renaming a single file. That's absolutely fine, but once they have discovered how powerful the shell can be they often change their mind. It's just a different way of handling certain tasks. Isn't that the fundamental question in the background of all our discussions?

The more market share that linux takes the more development we will get in our little space. Right now windows has the share because people know that when they get a (thing) be it software or hardware that it will work in windows. This is not yet the case with linux. I use a Wireless broadband card. In order to make this work I create a windows virtual machine as a router. There are all kinds of things I have to give up when I run linux.

I would have to give up many many things when running Windows. Again, we have just a different point of view and that's the reason why I only asked to consider...

[...] I do agree that you should be able to turn it off in YAST...

...the possibility to turn off an automount mechanism in future SUSE Linux releases. Other emails here on this list and many discussions with other users/administrators have shows that I am not alone with my opinion. Cheers, Th. *most likely EOT for me*

houghi writes:

Now imagine the folloing questions: When I not in Gnome or in KDE, I am unable to read my CD's.

Those questions do not occur. If a user does not use Gnome or KDE, he is an expert and knows how to solve self-made problems. If he does not know, the answer is: Log into Gnome or KDE. -- Karl Eichwalder R&D / Documentation SUSE Linux Products GmbH Key fingerprint = B2A3 AF2F CFC8 40B1 67EA 475A 5903 A21B 06EB 882E

Am Dienstag, 14. Februar 2006 06:44 schrieb houghi:

On Mon, Feb 13, 2006 at 09:58:21PM +0000, Thomas Hertweck wrote:

...

I have never seen any person who grew up with UNIX systems complaining about unusable systems.

Then you have not seen me swear when I started with Linux on my own machine and was unable to read another floppy, because the first one I had forgotten to unmount. Rebooting was my only option then (due to lack of knowledge) and you can imagine how usefull I thought the system was.

Now imagine the folloing questions: When I not in Gnome or in KDE, I am unable to read my CD's. I personally would be not a very happy person and would think that the Windows zealots are right: Linux is not ready for the desktop if it even can not do such a simple task. Anything else than Gnome or KDE isn't ready for the desktop anyway. So this is not an argument. If someone knows how to use alternativ windowmanagers, he also knows, how to mount medias by hand. If he doesn't, he will switch back to KDE. That's my experience...

-- Üdvözlettel -- Mit freundlichen Grüssen, Marcel Hilzinger

houghi wrote:

On Tue, Feb 14, 2006 at 09:59:28AM +0100, Marcel Hilzinger wrote:

...

Anything else than Gnome or KDE isn't ready for the desktop anyway. So this is not an argument. If someone knows how to use alternativ windowmanagers, he also knows, how to mount medias by hand. If he doesn't, he will switch back to KDE. That's my experience...

yes, he will switch back. That is also the most lame excuse as to why it should work on KDE and Gnome and not on anything else.

I don't agree. While having a solution that works for other window managers and for the console, Karl and Marcel's point isn't wrong. I mean, it's not like it would be impossible to mount a pluggable device. Use mount and umount. And, yes, I do agree it's a step backwards, etc... And once again, KDE and GNOME couldn't find a common solution with a core daemon that runs without dependencies on any of the environments + a layer that's specific to each environment. While competition amongst KDE and GNOME is a good thing in general, on some topics they should really find a common solution. And don't tell me they do with freedesktop.org, I know better ;)

Why support it on KDE? Just drop it on KDE and only sport it on Gnome. If people can not figure it out how to do it on KDE, they will switch to Gnome. Oh wait: Let's not support it on Linux alltogether. If people can not get it, they can switch back to Windows. At least if I would follow the reasoning that other enviroments are not allowed to have automounting.

Stop trolling. Being disrespectful to people just won't help.

OK, back to finding a solution.

Yes please. -- -o) Pascal Bleser http://linux01.gwdg.de/~pbleser/ /\\ _\_v FOSDEM 2006 -- 25+26 February 2006 in Brussels

Hi, On Tuesday, February 14, 2006 at 06:44:03, houghi wrote:

Now imagine the folloing questions: When I not in Gnome or in KDE, I am unable to read my CD's.

With beta4 you will be. Just start ivman in your session and be done with it. Ive added the package+halmount.py from ludwig to the tree yesterday... Henne -- Henne Vogelsang, Core Services "Rules change. The Game remains the same." - Omar (The Wire)

On Tue, Feb 14, 2006 at 12:55:32PM +0100, Henne Vogelsang wrote:

With beta4 you will be. Just start ivman in your session and be done with it. Ive added the package+halmount.py from ludwig to the tree yesterday...

Will that clash with the solution in KDE+Gnome, or is this a generic workaround? e.g. Could I de-install the KDE/Gnome solution and use this instead? The reason I am asking is that sometimes when I run WindowMaker, I launch KDE or Gnome on the side. Just curious. houghi -- I get up each morning, gather my wits. Pick up the paper, read the obits. If I'm not there I know I'm not dead. So I eat a good breakfast and go back to bed.