Tim: >> 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? Mike McCarty: > The only partition which is automatically mounted is /, yes. > But that does not mean that fstab is "wiped". It has entries > for 26 mounts. > > I suppose that, should you insert a Windows disc with a "setup.exe" > on it, you want automatically to start Wine and run the installer? I never advocated auto-runs, and never will. Nine times out of ten when I insert a disc, I want to browse the contents, or get something specific, not run someone's driver installation routine, or OS installation, or application installation... >> Linux's bloody awful management of removable media also annoys me, >> it's only recently got more sane. > Well, all *NIX style OS are "bloody awful", I agree. I don't agree > that it is getting better. I think it is. It's less painful, now to insert and remove a CD-ROM. Usually mine manages to mount it properly upon in insertion (I've turned off the thing that opens a browse window at the same time, I don't usually want to go through the contents with Nautilus, it's a sucky file browser). It, also, usually manages to eject a disc when I press the eject button. Though there's times it won't let its grip go on a read-only medium, even after I've gone through and "killed" anything that might have been paying attention to the drive. I see no earthly reason why a read-only disc shouldn't be releasble from the drive. If the PC wants it back again, it could ask you to reinsert volume "my-february-data" and wait for you to do so, carrying on doing other things in the meantime. My fifteen year old Amiga managed to do that quite well. > But having things "automatically mount and do something for you" > strikes me as more the Windows way of doing things than anything else, > and one of the things about Windows which annoys me quite a bit. Doing all your computers work for it seems to be the Linux way... While I hadn't advocated auto-mounting, I certainly do. I tend to find that when one inserts a floppy, CD, DVD, memory card, that one wants to use at that moment. Likewise, removal of removable media ought to be just as simple. My old personal computer had no problem with that, so long as you waited about a second before extracting the media. Writes were not immediate, but certainly not delayed indefinitely. > I don't like anything to remove control of my machine from my hands, > especially software which may inadvertently or intentionally do damage > to my setup. You haven't lost control. Linux still offers you the old way of doing things, if you really are such a glutton for punishment. > Using volume names means ensuring that they never collide, and > creates an entire name management problem. Only if you never thought of it when naming things, and only if the OS writers never thought of that neither. For removable media, it doesn't matter if all your discs are called "data", if you only have one disc drive. You can easily find it when mounted, it's /media/data, on every PC that reads the volume label (not /mnt/data, or /mnt/cdrom, or /media/cdwriter/, and so on, depending on which PC you're on at the time). Again, my fifteen year old Amiga handled those situations with aplomb. If you had two liked named volumes inserted at the same time, the second one would temporarily get a name change (volume.1 instead of just volume). And if you did something like open a file from "data", take out the disc, insert another disc called "data" then try to save your first file, it'd ask for you to swap discs. It could tell like-named discs apart. It's the computer, it should be doing the work for you. > Also, anything which "auto mounts" at any time is not going to survive > on my machine for more than the time it takes to remove it permanently > from my discs. Such behavior is a enormous security hole begging for > a breach. Bollocks. Automounting a CD-ROM that I've inserted, should get it mounted as owned by me, not root or someone else. It shouldn't be able to do anything to the *system*. It should appear as an extension of your own user-space. And auto-mounting is not the same thing as auto-running.
