cdcontrol purpose

[Andriy Gapon]

The following question may seem to be offtopic for this list, but I
think that it's not because it is related not only to cdcontrol utility
itself but also to the CD-ROM drivers.

The question: should cdcontrol utility be able to eject a mounted disk
(i.e. a filesystem on the disk is mounted) ?

This question could also be understood as: should cdcontrol be a
powerful administration tool that allows foot-shooting or should it be a
basic tool that gives a user some control over a CD-ROM drive ?

cdcontrol(1) seems to hint at the latter:
DESCRIPTION
   The cdcontrol utility is a program to control audio features of a CD
   drive.  The device is a name such as cd0 or acd0.
[emphasis on "audio features"]

More technical background description can be found at:
http://docs.freebsd.org/cgi/getmsg.cgi?fetch=457200+0+archive/2007/freebsd-stable/20071223.freebsd-stable

Description of even weirder problems caused by smart userland software
(HAL), dozen message thread:
http://docs.freebsd.org/cgi/getmsg.cgi?fetch=785719+0+archive/2007/freebsd-questions/20071216.freebsd-questions

P.S. CVS log suggests that cdcontrol code stayed the same from initial
version 1.1.

P.P.S. issuing ioctl(CDIOCALLOW) before closing tray seems even more
dubious.

-- 
Andriy Gapon