Bug#276253: ITP: pmount -- mount removable devices as normal user

[Martin Pitt <martin@piware.de>]

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