Bug#276253: ITP: pmount -- mount removable devices as normal user
Package: wnpp
Severity: wishlist
Package name : pmount
Version : 0.2
Upstream Author : Martin Pitt <mpitt@debian.org>
URL : (currently in Ubuntu, will put it on
http://www.piware.de/projects.shtml soon)
License : GPL
Description : mount removable devices as normal user
pmount ("policy mount") is a wrapper around the standard mount program which
permits normal users to mount removable devices without a matching /etc/fstab
entry. This provides a robust basis for automounting frameworks like GNOME's
Utopia project and confines the amount of code that runs as root to a minimum.
-----
Ubuntu currently uses pmount to mount removable devices instead of using the
fstab-update.sh approach of hal. This has three major advantages:
- It allows to run hal as a normal user instead of root and confines the amount
of code that runs with root privileges to a minimum. pmount is very small,
was programmed very carefully, and has been proofread by several people
(including Matt Zimmerman).
- It avoids changing a central system configuration file and thus is more
robust.
- It keeps hal policy free, the policy under which users can mount devices is
determined and enforced by pmount.
Since Debian's utopia stack does not use pmount, I will not let pmount go into
Sarge. But I was asked to put it into sid soon for people to play with and for
other Custom distributions. Sjoerd Simons seems to be open to integrate pmount
into sarge+1's Utopia stack, too.
Have a nice day!
Martin
Reply to: