Mike McCarty: >>>IMO, mounting by "volume name" is a very poor way to do things. Tim: >> Okay, you have some program, let's call it SuperThing. It has a >> collection of discs because that's how it comes. At some stage it wants >> its disc one, later on it wants its disc two, and so on. Mike McCarty: > Should I ever encounter that circumstance, > I would prefer to do the mounts myself by hand, and respond to > a prompt. Why have a computer which automates repetitive tasks, if you're going to much of the work yourself? Have you wiped out your fstab file, and mount every partition by hand each time you boot up? Back when I used an Amiga, we had disks accessible in different ways. The first floppy drive was DF0: (device name). If you inserted a disk, its volume name was used (e.g. Workbench:). We could also assign other aliases to things, such as "Sys:" being the system drive that the system booted up from (this time). The disk was addressable by either name (assign, device, or volume). You could refer to whatever disk was in the drive as df0: and if you happened to have the right disk in that drive, or didn't care what disk was in that drive (e.g. listing the contents of df0:), you were ok. But if the wrong disk was in that drive, you were screwed. Trying to access df0:myfile is not going to work if your disk happens to be in df1:, at the moment. This is where arbitrary mount points fall apart, whether it be a floppy, CD, DVD, portable hardrive, or something else. Alternatively, you could ask for a file on the Workbench disk, and it didn't matter where the disk was actually inserted, the system found your file for you. i.e. Workbench:filename The same scheme worked for hard drives, and other storage systems. The ability, over many years, of having a system that could work both ways showed the vast superiority of being able to get "mydisk:mydir/myfile" as simply as that. Later, having to deal with Windows and it's dumb drive letter business, even worse the drive letter shuffling, was horribly backward in comparison. And the Linux directory tree was similarly retarded (no useful support for volume names, so it's no wonder users have no experience at how good they are). Linux's bloody awful management of removable media also annoys me, it's only recently got more sane. -- (This box runs FC5, my others run FC4 & FC6, in case that's important to the thread.) Don't send private replies to my address, the mailbox is ignored. I read messages from the public lists.
