Package: wnpp Severity: wishlist Package name : pmount Version : 0.2 Upstream Author : Martin Pitt <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 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