Re: Automounter in KDE
On Thursday 11 August 2005 09:13 am, serja wrote:
> > This has been a long thread which has left me none the wiser. Could
> > somebody sum up the present conclusions or point to an easy-to-understand
> > resource on present KDE, Debian or Linux mounting philosophy?
>
> I think developers from kernel.org not really support the idea of
> automounting and they definitely not support the unplugging / hardware
> eject of removable media thingies without umounting them.
And that, of course, is the core problem. Yes, removing stuff without
unmounting it is a problem that is not solved without eliminating
write-behind cache. Fine. But when I plug in my multi-slot USB card reader,
it should automatically create logical, consistent names for each slot
independently and then mount them as needed. There is, in 2005, simply no
excuse for that to not work automatically.
Yet, when I do so, I have to first spend an hour with udev's various
not-well-named-or-documented tools to figure out what the heck it is and how
to identify it, then write a udev rule that I hope works. Then when I insert
a card, I first have to unplug and replug the reader so that it notices (no
joke), then wait about 15 seconds while nothing happens, then try to mount
the device (generally using KDE 3.4's media:/ IOSlave these days, but
whatever). That's about a paragraph too long. And that's on Debian with
KDE. Fedora with Gnome, SuSE with fvwm, it would likely be different.
This is very much a hardware-software interface issue, which means it's a
kernel issue. Whether the tool itself is in user space or kernel space
architecturally, the fault for removable media still sucking lies with the
kernel team. This is a problem they should be solving, not punting to a
half-dozen half-baked, incompatible bandaids. (And yes, that's what even
media:/ is.)
GNU doesn't have a problem with removable media. Linux, the kernel, sucks for
removable media. And until the kernel devs get out of the 1970s, that's not
going to change.
--
Larry Garfield AIM: LOLG42
larry@garfieldtech.com ICQ: 6817012
"If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of
exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea,
which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to
himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession
of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it." -- Thomas
Jefferson
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