On Mon, Jun 13, 2011 at 11:30 AM, Phillip Susi <ps...@cfl.rr.com> wrote: > So you are saying that the policy of auto mounting external drives and not > internal ones is fundamentally broken and must go away? Why not fix it to > work correctly rather than remove the feature?
Because it just cannot be fixed. Let me elaborate: It's nice that your Dell laptop happens to get the bits right in its AHCI registers, hurrah and all, but as soon as you are relying on BIOS vendors to get your user experience (e.g. automounting, ability to mount at all) then you've lost. So in this case it's better to just simplify your model (e.g. throw out the notion that is drive is external/internal or not) so you do not rely on e.g. BIOS writers to get it right. That way everything is simpler and our software works the same on all hardware. Then there's the other view that says that very few people really care about whether a drive is external or not. Sure, it's nice, but it's really overkill - it's not something that 99% of all non-geeks ever need to control. And if they do, they know how to work around it. Hell, there's the people who say that the line is too blurry to even say whether a drive is external or not - e.g. one mans external drive is another mans internal drive. For example, what value would you assign to the :DeviceIsSystemInternal property for a SATA disk that sits in a trayless bay of an external SAS 8-disk tower? You can argue both ways that it's system-internal and that it isn't. By not having things like the SystemInternal property, we nicely sidestep all these problems and our software becomes easier to write, maintain and use. And more importantly, it becomes easier to debug. And it reduces pressure on support channels (e.g. the corporate helpdesk or the son of the user). Less _is_ more. Btw, there are plans to introduce a UDISKS_AUTOMOUNT_HINT variable that can assume the values 'always' and 'never' and make the desktop automounter use that variable (and of course have it documented in udisks(7), cf http://hal.freedesktop.org/docs/udisks/udisks.7.html ). This way you can simply write an udev rule that sets this - you may even write a small program that looks at the AHCI registers for this - or it could look at the phase of the moon or whatever you want. David _______________________________________________ devkit-devel mailing list devkit-devel@lists.freedesktop.org http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/devkit-devel