On 15/10/15 21:04, Vincent Fourmond wrote: > I'm OK to give input, and do few things from time to time...
It seems I'm still in the Cc list because I said something about the adoption a while ago. To clarify, I do not intend to get involved in this package's maintenance, and anything I say about it is only a suggestion. I do have one comment, which is that the package Description could perhaps benefit from updating: it describes pmount's original motivation, which was as a backend for GNOME and other GUI stuff. However, GNOME and other "large" desktop environments have stopped using it in favour of the more featureful (but correspondingly heavier-weight) udisks2, leaving pmount as a potentially useful tool in its own right, but no longer directly used by GNOME. (No value-judgement intended here - pmount is simple and small; udisks2 is more complex and larger; and either could be more suitable than the other, depending on your requirements.) The major differences: * udisks2 is a privileged D-Bus system service (daemon), controlled via D-Bus messages by an accompanying (unprivileged) CLI tool or by other unprivileged processes like the various GNOME GUIs that use it. pmount is a setuid CLI tool (a privilege boundary) with no daemon, which can be executed directly or by an unprivileged frontend; less complexity, but more need to cope with the security implications of being setuid. * udisks2 has a broader scope, and also handles non-mount operations on disk devices, such as partitioning and SMART. pmount has a narrower scope, and only (un)mounts disks. * udisks2 uses PolicyKit for access control, with a relatively subtle default policy designed to "do what I mean" (locally-logged-in users can mount removable disks on the same "seat" where they are currently logged-in), but configurable to have other policies (e.g. a group-based override) if that's what a sysadmin wants. pmount's policy is simpler, using group-ownership to allow any user in the plugdev group to mount removable disks, whether they are logged-in locally or remotely; this is simple and easy to understand if you know how Unix groups work, but can lead to unexpected results if the system is multi-seat or has remote access (users taking control of each other's USB drives). Hopefully that's enough information for a Description that indicates to a potential user whether pmount is suitable for their needs. In particular, it seems worthwhile to mention "users in the plugdev group" in the Description. S