Firstboot: Module to add other OS partitions' entry to fstab

[David Zeuthen]

On Tue, 2005-06-07 at 13:26 -0400, Jeff Spaleta wrote:
> On 6/7/05, David Zeuthen <david at fubar.dk> wrote:
> > Well, for admins I suppose that gconf-editor is pretty good? 
> 
> gconf-editor can be..adequate.. under certain conditions.  The primary
> one being you know exactly what boolean you are looking for before you
> go looking for it and its not a critically important setting.  I would
> suggest that a boolean that can have serious system-wide effects like
> the problems you described in your post isn't something people
> shouldn't have to troll through the gconf tree for.. in a panic.  We
> aren't talking about turning on metacity wireframe window moving to
> get a slight speedup on low end hardware. You mentioned potential data
> corruption situations... i think thats important enough to expose in
> sort sort of dedicated ui.  Potentially important enough to be a
> firstboot dialog.

You make some good points here. At this point, I don't really know, I
*think* we may want to put it somewhere in the install/firstboot and
perhaps also ask other questions so it looks like

 [ ] Automatically mount internal fixed drives                     (1)
 [x] Automatically mount external storage devices                  (2)
   [ ] Require password for write access to external storage       (3)
 [x] Ignore SCSI drives for auto mounting                          (4)
   [x] Except optical drives                                       (5)

where (2) and (3) is needed for lock down; think either a) system in a
library where people are not allowed to copy material to USB sticks; or
b) an enterprise with low trust in their people ;-). That's this
article: http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20040916.html - search
for ''epoxy''.

Also, (4) and (5) is needed for the "enthusiast user" that uses SCSI
drives; by default we ignore them since we can't really tell apart a
Fiber Channel controller with 500 drivers from the enthusiast with his,
say, two SCSI drives - we don't want the former to get 500+ icons on the
desktop for mounted drives (I had a bug report about that pre-FC3),
however, we do want the latter to work...

So, it's all pretty complex if you want to auto mount drives in a sane
way without screwing everyone. For the UI for these options, I think we
need some of the interaction/ usability guys to say whether we can ask
the user these questions :-). We'll see..

Cheers,
David