How to remove some mounted partition icons?

[David Zeuthen]

On Sun, 2007-12-30 at 20:24 -0900, Jeff Spaleta wrote:
> On Dec 30, 2007 8:01 PM, David Zeuthen <davidz at redhat.com> wrote:
> > The comment option is not exactly new: man 5 fstab
> 
> I meant instead of using a specific comment string to mean hide versus
> some pre-existing option that would be interpreted as unhide if
> present. noauto has been suggested by others.
> But I'm sure you are right the comment  option makes more sense.  Can
> you have multiple comment options defined?

Well, you could have tried this yourself instead of tricking me into
trying it out to found out. FWIW, the answer is yes

$ cat /etc/fstab |grep /dev/disk/by-path/pci-0000:00:1d.1-usb-0:2:1.0-scsi-0:0:0:0-part1
/dev/disk/by-path/pci-0000:00:1d.1-usb-0:2:1.0-scsi-0:0:0:0-part1	/mnt/foo		auto	defaults,users,dev,suid,exec,comment=hidden,comment=foobar 0 0
$ mount /dev/disk/by-path/pci-0000:00:1d.1-usb-0:2:1.0-scsi-0:0:0:0-part1
$ cat /etc/mtab |grep /dev/sdb1
/dev/sdb1 /mnt/foo vfat rw 0 0
$ cat /proc/mounts |grep /dev/sdb1
/dev/sdb1 /mnt/foo vfat rw,relatime,uid=500,gid=500,fmask=0022,dmask=0022,codepage=cp437,iocharset=ascii,utf8 0 0

> Sorry I meant, hide by default, and use an fstab option to unhide for
> specific entries you don't want hidden.  The question was meant as
> which makes the best default policy with respect to fstab entries.
> Opt-out of hide or Opt-in of hide.  Naively, I would think it would
> think hiding all fstab entries by default and using an option to
> unhide would be the more prominent desire. We are talking about
> manually added entries so it's probably a coin flip in reality.  I'm
> not going to press the point.

Keep in mind that we hide partitions which are mere OS implementation
details; e.g. mounts on /, /usr, /var and other FHS2.3 locations as well
as /var/tmp, /var/audit since some security guidance documents say it's
a good idea to have these on separate file systems.

Personally I think people who wants some non-OS implementation file
systems hidden are geeky control freaks with 8 different distros
installed on the same hard drive; e.g. a system that is too customized
for their own good. I don't think normal people will ever run into these
issues. 

Frankly, it's certainly not such kind of users I want to optimize GNOME
for. That being said, I don't want to make things impossible for them
hence why I'm suggesting this approach.

So I think it's like this: Most people with a lot of partitions on a
useful system (e.g. one where they don't test drive 8 distros at the
same time) either a) don't really use the desktop (it's a server); or b)
if they do use the desktop, they just find it's convenient to have the
icons on the desktop (because they have useful data on the partitions
instead of just different flavors of Linux).

Then again, everyone's a critic when it comes to how the UI should
behave and look.

> If comment=hide does end up being the syntax to hide, would it be
> possible to add boilerplate to the fstab file generated at fedora
> install time to indicate that option can be used  to hide partitions
> in addition to updating the fstab manpage?  It might save a lot of
> additional discussion if admins going into fstab for manual editting
> see a simple boilerplate notice annoucing the new comment=hide
> parsing.

That would be a layering violation (a lower layer mentioning how a
higher layer works) to mention this in /etc/fstab. And it probably
wouldn't apply to KDE or whatever desktop someone is using.

     David