> Actually I think it would be fine to make the floppy world-writable.
> Except on the few machines where there are lots of users actually
> using floppies, that is what I would always do anyway. And on those
> few machines, maybe it is better to require explicit mount commands.
I always assume a network environment in which other users are present
on the machine.
For most machines, this assumption is 99% or 100% untrue. Most
machines are either personal or used only by a few friends of the
owner. There is no sense in paying a high price to stop the other
people you gave accounts to from looking at your floppies. If you
distrust them that much, you would probably do well not to give them
accounts on your machine.
True, some machines are operated by ISPs for public access by users
who don't even know each other. Perhaps they want to take special
precautions. But it is pointless inconvenience for everyone to take
such precautions on their personal machines.
I agree with you that there should be no to minimal overhead by adding a
VFS hook - all that has to be done is force a umount of the device, and
(although I haven't looked at the code) I see no reason why this can't
be done. The hook already exists, it's just not being used by anything
other than syslog. One issue may be that it gets the signal too late
(eg, at access time, not insertion).
Either way, it seems that the real solution is the supermount patches,
which do not appear to be part of the stock kernel. These things have
been floating around since before kernel 2.0 it seems so I don't know
why they are still not integrated.
If this does the job, I hope it will get integrated soon.
It will help beginning users.
