Another good argument which hasn't been cited in this thread yet is that the
locations the device mounts to aren't (or weren't when this was introduced,
maybe this has improved) guaranteed to stay constant across reboots.
And in addition, automounting an ext2/ext3 partition from an older version of
Fedora or RHL (or another older distribution) can make that system fail to boot
due to new ext3 features like extended attributes getting enabled, which the
old kernel can't deal with.
IMHO, fixed devices are really what /etc/fstab is for. This also gives you the
advantage that you can pick any mount point you wish (for example /c for C: if
you dual-boot that proprietary OS which still uses drive letters in 2007)
instead of getting something like /media/VOLUME_LABEL or /media/DISK_1 or
whatever automatically assigned.
For a live CD which should be able to mount partitions on the host computer,
it's easy to zap that policy file (it's just an rm in the .ks file for the live
CD). But beware not to use that live CD on computers with older GNU/Linux
distributions which don't support the latest ext3 features installed.
Kevin Kofler
