FreeBSD, FHS, and /mnt/cdrom
Charles Swiger
cswiger at mac.com
Sat Nov 22 11:18:35 PST 2003
On Nov 21, 2003, at 9:41 AM, Frank Murphy wrote:
> The folks at the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard (FHS) are discussing
> (again) where directories for recurring temporary mount points should
> go.
> Recurring temporary mount points are for things like cdroms, floppies,
> and digital cameras as well as HD partitions from other OSes (like MS
> Windows).
>
> Red Hat started putting these in /mnt (e.g. /mnt/cdrom), but that
> totally
> breaks compatibility with the BSDs, which have specified /mnt as an
> empty
> directory for ad hoc temporary mounts. SuSE has started putting these
> in
> /media, and now folks on the FHS list would like to know what people in
> the BSDs' communities would prefer.
/mnt should be reserved as a default temporary mount point-- it's silly
to risk breaking existing tools or procedures. Anyway, I suggest you
solicit feedback from Solaris users and possibly MacOS X people as
well. Solaris features vold (implied by wanting to use /vol), and the
latter OS places temporary removable mountpoints under /Volumes.
I happen to think that OS X handles things well from a user interface
standpoint-- the Finder in Panther with Miller column display and an
eject symbol next to the volume name, but I'm not sure how relevant
that is. Frank, is your group's standard concerned about physical
volume names, logical volume names intended for human
identification/access, or both?
Physical device names ought to have unit numbers or even be part of a
tree-like device hierarchy-- for instance, what does /cdrom refer to in
a machine with two CD-ROM devices?
Human-readable names also run the risk of two removable devices having
the same name; people are happy seeing a list containing duplicate
names (eg, particularly if one name has a CDROM icon next to it, and
the other has a floppy or USB pen icon :-), but that doesn't tell you
what to do with your filesystem hierarchy layout.
Obviously, a standard that says "place mount points anywhere you want"
isn't very useful. But if you did come up with a standard, who should
follow it and what would they gain?
--
-Chuck
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