latest kudzu changes

[David Zeuthen]

On Tue, 2004-08-17 at 11:32 +0100, Manuel Moreno wrote:
> First of all I think that the whole idea of changing '/etc/fstab' is
> essentially flawed (there are much better alternatives like automount -
> that is kernel/distribution standard- or supermount, etc...)

Mounting is something you want to at least control from userspace since
it's policy (mount options as you imply below) so you need some kind of
file. 

Alternatively we could patch mount(1) to read another file
than /etc/fstab or do something third like asking the hal daemon (the
latter would be kind of stupid though). However. One of the strongest
points is basically to maintain the policy and system administrator
tradition that /etc/fstab lists the available filesystems. Tons of
software depends on this including gnome-vfs without hal support (the
devices shown in computer:///).

And it's not that scary if done right. The /etc/fstab is way below 4kb
and the update can thus be done atomically.

> But, anyway, if we have to bear with it, when are the mount options
> going to be configurable, I'm thinking of 'noatime,nodiratime,sync' for
> usb flash devices and maybe other like 'umask,users' etc for usb ide
> disks, etc.
> 
> 'updfstab' missed it (there was a patch floating around, however) and I
> hope that the replacement will have them included. 
> 

Sure. This is something we probably want to have per-user so fstab-sync
should ask some service running in the users session that reads it from
gconf or the KDE equivalent.

Until then you can always write udev rules to properly name your device
and add your own entries with that device to /etc/fstab with your
favourite options.

Hope this helps,
David