Hi, I think this thread
http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/hal/2005-May/002490.html and countless others, shows that using hal properties (storage.policy.* and volume.policy.*) to specify policy for mounting / unmounting volumes isn't really the way to go :-). Specific complaints of mine (most severe issues comes first) o it's too complicated o difficult to build a GUI for managing this o difficult to adjust per-user o there really needs to be a way for the mount program to interact with the desktop user (to e.g. bypass lockdown) [1]. It seemed like a good idea at the time we did this, but I think we can do better. Ideally, what I like is the following o Remove all storage.policy.* and volume.policy.* properties. It shouldn't be in hal o Move all policy into a ''policy mount wrapper'' a'la pmount, let's just call it hmount for the time being :-). I'm not attached to what it is called o hmount has a well defined programmatic interface (since we may have different implementations for KDE and GNOME) o hmount reads policy from gconf (on GNOME) or KConfig (on KDE) - this is mostly such that it's easy to lock down and it's easy to write UI to reconfigure policy. Here are some common things the UI should support - Specify mount point to use / mount options / whether to mount read only (for lock down). Use the HAL UDI as the unique key. Suggest to, for GNOME, integrate this UI upstream in Nautilus. - Specify whether the volume/drive should be visible to the user at all: (a) it may be too risky to show e.g. partitions on the fixed IDE drive since fs detection is a risky; (b) in the data center we don't want to show SCSI drives stemming from e.g Fibre Channel [2] o hmount should pop up a notification bubble / dialog if mounting read-only and ask if the user wants to authorize for mounting read-write. I've copied [email protected] and pmount developer Martin Pitt to hear whether he is interested in collaborating on this. I certainly think this is something worth fixing upstream. Cheers, David [1] : OK, so lock down is controversial. Suffice to say, some enterprise users wants this and I can imagine it's useful in libraries etc. Also see this article http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20040916.html and search for epoxy. [2] : Actually, once I had a bug for a Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 beta regarding more than 100 icons showing up on the GNOME desktop :-) _______________________________________________ utopia-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/utopia-list
