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Bug#422005: RFA: pmount -- mount removable devices as normal user



Package: wnpp

Hello,

three years ago I wrote pmount ("policy mount") to get a small and
pretty secure backend for automatically mounting removable devices as
normal user without fstab entries:

|Description: mount removable devices as normal user
| pmount 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.
| .
| This package also contains a wrapper "pmount-hal" which reads some
| information like device labels and mount options from hal and passes
| them to pmount. Install the package "hal" if you want to use this
| feature.
| .
| If a LUKS capable cryptsetup package is installed, pmount is able to
| transparently mount encrypted volumes.

However, since hal 0.5.8 got a reasonably secure architecture, it
obsoleted pmount by and large, since the world moves to dbus and
hal-based solutions.

However, there are some people and projects which want to use pmount
without the overhead of dbus and hal, so I don't want to ask for
removal right away, but rather for someone who still uses it and wants
to adopt it (as both upstream and Debian maintainer).

It currently has some bug reports; most of them aren't major issues,
but there are some reports about not working on latest kernels,
and there is a small but steady stream of feature enhancements and
patch contributions. For adopting this you should have some experience
with writing safe C programs and know a bit about sysfs and block
devices. The code is really clean and without major external
dependencies and should stay that way (at least for the core pmount
which is suid root; wrappers like pmount-hal can be a bit more
liberal).

If someone is interested in this, I am happy to show him around in the
code and bzr tree, and I'm also happy to check and sponsor uploads
from non-DDs.

Thanks,

Martin

-- 
Martin Pitt        http://www.piware.de
Ubuntu Developer   http://www.ubuntu.com
Debian Developer   http://www.debian.org

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