On 2016-11-20 at 11:46, Joe wrote: > On Sun, 20 Nov 2016 15:14:47 +0100 <tomas@tuxteam.de> wrote: >> Sorry I can't offer more details: I'm not "in" the intricacies of >> desktop environments. For me, they are too intricate and finicky, >> therefore I prefer to run without. >> >> I mount my media explicitly. > > So do I. If I don't want a USB stick mounted, I don't plug it in. That's not explicit; it's invoking the implicit mount which your system is configured to execute upon the device being connected. Unless you are explicitly issuing a command which says "mount this device to this path", you are not _explicitly_ mounting the media; it either is not being mounted at all, or is being mounted automatically. Connecting a device does not equal issuing a command to mount it. > If I do plug it in, apart from formatting, why would I not want it > mounted? Perhaps because you know the drive is damaged, such that the mount attempt will fail (and might hang, or even spawn zombie processes), and you don't want the system attempting to access it unnecessarily. Perhaps because there are multiple filesystems on the device, and you only want to mount one of them. (Perhaps you even want to refrain from updating access timestamps which get updated on mount or unmount; I believe there are filesystems which include that behavior.) Perhaps because you want to _choose_ where to mount it to, according to criteria specific to the case at hand, rather than relying on whatever global defaults are configured. Perhaps because you want to dump an unmodified copy of the filesystem to a file on local disk, without risking the filesystem being modified during the mount / unmount process. I imagine there may be other possibilities... > I don't want any applications or media to autorun, but I do want the > filesystems mounted. That's an entirely reasonable usage pattern, but it is not explicit mounting, and there are legitimate reasons why someone might want different behavior. -- The Wanderer The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. -- George Bernard Shaw
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