Automounting filesystems in partman
A while back I checked in a d-i feature from Ubuntu onto a branch: when
partman is starting up, it looks through the partitions already on the
disks, and for those containing filesystems that are usefully mountable
(currently ext2, ext3, fat16, fat32, jfs, ntfs, reiserfs, xfs) it sets
the default mount point to "/media/$(basename $(mapdevfs $device))". If
the user selects manual partitioning, they'll be able to deselect these
defaults or leave them be, at their option; automatic partitioning will
just use the defaults. The intent of this change is to arrange for files
on filesystems belonging to other operating systems to be easily
accessible by default (e.g. on a desktop, although I had seen no reason
why it wasn't useful for other types of installations too) without
having to know how to mount them; the choice of default mount point was
chosen as the best location I could think of within the spirit of the
FHS, and to match the default behaviour of pmount (and thus the GNOME
desktop; I don't know about KDE or others, although pmount is not
desktop-specific).
Some of the code is in mainline partconf, and the rest is in this
partman-basicfilesystems branch:
svn di -r28138 svn://svn.debian.org/svn/d-i/people/cjwatson/automount/partman-basicfilesystems/
Today Maximilian Attems brought this up on IRC, and after a brief
diversion while I got confused about whether it was sanely mergeable, I
proposed merging it. I had expected any objections to be about the
choice of default mount point, but instead the discussion got
unexpectedly heated about whether d-i should do this at all. I'll
attempt to summarise the debate here and invite further discussion. The
viewpoints expressed below are obviously not all mine; I hope I haven't
misrepresented anyone or omitted too much.
* Don't want FAT, VFAT, NTFS in fstab by default; Debian is not a
desktop distribution and is for people who want to configure things
if they want something other than minimalist defaults (fjp).
- Much argument about what Debian's audience should be, whether we
should be thinking of desktop usability or leaving that to
derivatives, etc. (makx, fjp, vorlon, p2-mate, Kamion, etc.)
- Should only do things when explicitly requested (p2-mate).
* Why is it bad to have partitions automounted even on servers?
(Kamion)
- Don't want test partitions mounted; will mount them manually if I
care (fjp)
- Can trigger bugs / unwanted modifications in journalling
filesystems, e.g. Linux XFS has problems mounting Irix XFS (ths).
vorlon asked whether that could be addressed by mounting
read-only, but apparently that still tries to replay the journal.
- Security / confusion issues caused by mounting partitions with
different access control policies or different uid/gid mappings
(fjp).
* Easier in the GTK frontend where "automount filesystems?" can be a
checkbox without having to add an extra question to the default
installation path (Kamion, fjp).
- ... but don't want to make the feature set available in the GTK
frontend different from that available in the newt frontend
(Kamion).
* Exclude partitions that may be modified when mounting read-only
(doesn't include FAT/NTFS, at least)? (ths, vorlon)
- Destruction of data on read-only mounts is a corner case in the
first place and therefore seems to be a concern for all filesystem
drivers (vorlon).
* Offer the user an explicit dialog asking which partitions to
automount? (svenl)
- Still doesn't address automated installs (ths).
What do people think? Perhaps there's some middle ground to be found
here.
Cheers,
--
Colin Watson [cjwatson@debian.org]
Reply to: