The folks at the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard (FHS) are discussing
(again) where directories for recurring temporary mount points should go.
Recurring temporary mount points are for things like cdroms, floppies,
and digital cameras as well as HD partitions from other OSes (like MS
Windows).
Red Hat started putting these in /mnt (e.g. /mnt/cdrom), but that totally
breaks compatibility with the BSDs, which have specified /mnt as an empty
directory for ad hoc temporary mounts. SuSE has started putting these in
/media, and now folks on the FHS list would like to know what people in
the BSDs' communities would prefer.
/mnt should be reserved as a default temporary mount point-- it's silly to risk breaking existing tools or procedures. Anyway, I suggest you solicit feedback from Solaris users and possibly MacOS X people as well. Solaris features vold (implied by wanting to use /vol), and the latter OS places temporary removable mountpoints under /Volumes.
I happen to think that OS X handles things well from a user interface standpoint-- the Finder in Panther with Miller column display and an eject symbol next to the volume name, but I'm not sure how relevant that is. Frank, is your group's standard concerned about physical volume names, logical volume names intended for human identification/access, or both?
Physical device names ought to have unit numbers or even be part of a tree-like device hierarchy-- for instance, what does /cdrom refer to in a machine with two CD-ROM devices?
Human-readable names also run the risk of two removable devices having the same name; people are happy seeing a list containing duplicate names (eg, particularly if one name has a CDROM icon next to it, and the other has a floppy or USB pen icon :-), but that doesn't tell you what to do with your filesystem hierarchy layout.
Obviously, a standard that says "place mount points anywhere you want" isn't very useful. But if you did come up with a standard, who should follow it and what would they gain?
-- -Chuck
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