Re: [dev] wmii: automount USB pens [was: dash, bash and tests in wmiirc]

On Wed, Jul 21, 2010 at 02:04:45AM +0200, LuX wrote:
>On Mon, Jul 19, 2010 at 03:08:17PM -0400, Kris Maglione wrote:
>> I'm not terribly fond of pmount either. I'm
>> currently using a (heavily) modified hal-based mounting script that
>> does the job quite nicely. Attached.
>
>I like the idea of mounting/unmounting USB pens without using neither
>pmount nor any file manager. Unfortunately halmount doesn't work for
>me:
>
>$ dash halmount /dev/sdb1
>Error org.freedesktop.Hal.Device.Volume.InvalidMountOption: The option
>'uid=1114' is not allowed for uid=1114
>ERROR: dbus-send failed

You need to run it under ck-launch-session. Starting wmii as
above works, or run 'ck-launch-session halmount'.

>I have tried to modify the script in various ways without success. I
>don't understand how dbus-send works, this is my problem. At least
>I have discovered with your script the hal-related commands. Also
>halumount works well.

Oh, you don't want to understand how dbus-send works. If you
want to change the script, though, you can remove the line that
adds uid=... to $OPTIONS, but then ntfs/fat volumes will be
owned by root.

>@Nick: Thank you for your udev rule. It might be handy, but I'm
>not so enthusiastic in using this method: it calls sudo (hence
>requires so special preferences for ordinary users, I guess) and I
>would be afraid that a hand-made udev rule like this one would be
>overwritten the next time I update my system. On the other hand the
>wiki of Arch pretends that:

There are those drawbacks (and a few others, like the fact that
the owner is always the same regardless of the currently logged
in user, and the fact that things are mounted whether you want
them or not), but if you use udev/rules.d, you needn't worry
about them being overwritten.

>> HAL is rapidly becoming obsolete in favor of udev. Currently, a
>> small number of programs still rely on and use HAL, though
>> development is heading toward utilizing udev as a replacement in the
>> near future.
>
>So it might be that your method is promised to a greater future.

I don't think so. First of all, that claim is a bit dubious. HAL
is, thankfully, being phased out, but it's still widely used for
volume management, and udev doesn't provide any similar
mountpoint management. Beyond that, you need to use something
like pmount and some other method of looking up mountable block
devices. When you've done this, of course, you no longer have
any standardization of where and how things are mounted (not
that HAL does a spectacular job of this, or has a remotely
reasonable method of configuring it). And, finally, you have to
do this from scratch for every non-Linux operating system you
want to use it on.

I've been looking for decent hot-pluggable mounting options for
years now, and sadly, HAL seems to be the only workable game in
town at the moment.

-- 
Kris Maglione
Simple things should be simple.  Complex things should be possible.
	--Alan Kay