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73416ba
(Get the code!)
(In reply to comment #8)
> [1] Installers need to unmount them again, mounting takes time, and broken file
> systems really shouldn't be automounted r/w without your consent, it only makes
> things worse (and you might have booted a live system to repair exactly that).
So maybe live systems should just turn off automounting. Or have a special option in the bootloader to do that. And if people are doing "forensic live-cds" they definitely want to do that. And they can.
Either way, the presumption that automounting stuff "makes things worse" is in my view just a bad excuse for broken file system drivers. In fact, it's better to expose and fix these drivers than try to avoid not triggering bugs.
If OS vendors don't want this behavior for certain versions of their OSes (like Red Hat's RHEL, SUSE's SLES or Canonical's Ubuntu LTS relases) it's relatively straightforward to patch things the way you want them. I just don't think it's something we want in the upstream sources where we are supposed to be moving things forward, not ensuring maximum compatibility.
(And, my gods, yes, some file systems are somewhat broken. When mounting, say, ext3 in read-only mode it plays back the journal triggering writes. You can argue both ways about this but my view is that it's mostly wrong to do this by default.)
(Btw, another thing is that the desktop bits should probably run fsck (via devkit-disks) before mounting anything. But that's a separate issue and should be filed agains gvfs in the gnome bugzilla.)
> IMHO your huge internal disks should be automounted on demand when you need
> them, i. e. when you click on the drive icon. It shouldn't really be so much
> different from the user's perspective when the drive is mounted (at session
> startup or when you open it in nautilus),
We can't really do this since it will break autorun and other things like that. Also, you are only referring to the UI, keep in mind the APIs are stateful and has a notion of mounted/unmounted. So it won't work.
Do note that the file manager, file chooser and panel Places UI does work mostly like this though. E.g. you click an icon and the experience is the same whether the the underlying mount is mounted or not.
> but it would avoid lengthy and
> expensive,
Mounting happens asynchronously so this "lengthy process" [sic] isn't really visible to anyone nor anything to worry about.
> and potential dangerous mount processes at session start.
See above.