On 7/12/2011 3:57 PM, David Zeuthen wrote:
As I've already explained GNOME does this for devices connected via USB/Firewire (99% of all flash readers) or for devices specifically tagged as being flash readers (covering flash readers connected via SDIO). So it's fine, GNOME is doing the right thing here for 99.9% of all users.
I am aware of the current situation. Based on discussions with various people over the last year or two ( including Key Sievers and Martin Pitt ), I thought it was now well understood that GNOME needs to go away from making that assumption based on the disk being USB or Firewire.
You would think so, sure. But as I already explained, this is not the case - people use GNOME everywhere even on servers and people don't tend to install the right variant of the distro. We just can't automount the world willy-nilly, sorry.
I would think that a server admin in such a comparatively VERY rare setup could be bothered to change the system policy to disable automount ( which is generally not something you want servers to do ever, whether it be on the SAN or a USB disk ). Leaving it enabled by default makes sense for the vast majority of cases, and simply extends the current behavior to include eSATA and other future interfaces.
So far the only use case I can see where you do not want to auto mount the world willy-nilly is this contrived case of a server attached to a SAN and having a desktop environment installed. This case has got to be at least two orders of magnitude more rare than desktop users with eSATA disks that DO expect them to be auto mounted.
And, here's the thing, we _don't_ need to automount the world that because the current limited whitelist consisting of USB/Firewire/Flash is already working fine for 99.9% of all users. And when it's not working, the user can now tweak it himself using UDISKS_AUTOMOUNT_HINT (if he even cares). If it's for a popular kind of device we can even ship that udev rule with upstream udisks.
There is no reliable way to differentiate between internal and external sata disks, so saying "write a udev rule to handle them" doesn't work.
Btw, your socalled "desktop distribution" can just set UDISKS_AUTOMOUNT_HINT=always for every device if they so desire - it's a simple udev rule. But I wouldn't recommend doing this.
A flag you can set to override the broken behavior misses the point that the built in behavior is broken.
As a rule of thumb, sure, it's never good to rely on heuristics, connection bus types, protocol types and whitelists. But it's just not that black/white and if data-loss can happen, as it can and _will_ if you just blindly automount filesystems, I'd rather err on the side of not losing data.
Besides the hybrid desktop/server on the SAN, where else could you run into trouble auto mounting a disk that shows up at run time?
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