Automounting of USB drives - Why is it a problem?

[Chris Rees]

2009/4/15 Odhiambo Washington <odhiambo at gmail.com>:
> Hello List,
>
> For some time now, I have been baffled by one thing: Mac OS X somehow has
> FreeBSD under the hood.

No! It has Darwin under the hood, but uses the FreeBSD userland.

> When you connect a USB stick (flash disk, external
> drive) to a Mac, it gets automounted, yet the same does not happen on
> FreeBSD.

This is a HAL feature, and you can do it; certainly I have it in Xfce for CDs.

> I have seen several questions being asked on this list about this feature,
> but the answer is neither here nor there.
> There is even a port (sysutils/automounter) that I believe is supposed to
> help towards this, but again it's not as easy as it seems to be.

> Now my question is just one: Why should it be this difficult for FreeBSD to
> have the automount feature within the base system?

No-one has yet made it perfect. Nothing gets committed to the base
system unless it works out of the box and works properly. Automounting
is a fiddly thing, and is not necessary for the majority of
applications; remember FreeBSD is primarily a server OS.

> If OS X is doing it, Linux is doing it, FreeBSD can do it.

Linux doesn't just do it. It just happens to be so that Ubuntu (for
example) have set this up in their distribution.

There are a million things that it would be nice to put in the base
system, but all it would do would be to bloat it, and make world
rebuilding that little bit longer.

Chris


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