Automounting of USB drives - Why is it a problem?

[Mel Flynn]

On Wednesday 15 April 2009 21:03:50 Polytropon wrote:
> On Wed, 15 Apr 2009 14:33:46 -0400, Mehmet Erol Sanliturk 
<m.e.sanliturk at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Problem is not to select an operating system to use but it is easiness of
> > usability of FreeBSD especially for the new beginners .
>
> The thing with "easieness of usability" is... well... it depends
> on what you are used to. Those who are (I hope it doesn't sound
> impolite)... "spoiled" by strange "Windows" concepts about how
> to do things (e. g. copying and moving files through the edit
> buffer... ugh...) may find things complicated where others say,
> "wow, so easy!" (e. g. "cp <source> <dest>" - compare this to
> the easieness of JCL!).
>
> What may be the best and most comfortable solution to me may
> sound like a nightmare to others.
>
> The topic, regarding USB automount, is such a case. The question
> that could arise is: In how much is the operating system responsible
> for this automounting? Should it be done by the OS, and if, by
> default, and if by default, with which parameters? Or should it
> be left to an additional service?

There's a lot of consolidation going on in the unix desktop world, that pretty 
much forces applications that are buggy, don't know anything about non-linux 
and require real effort from various FreeBSD developers to get in a somewhat 
working state, but it still eliminates options.

hal being my primary pet-peeve followed by xorg.

The reason why I embraced FreeBSD (after BSDi's premature death): ability to 
do it my way, which is slowly being taken away from me.

For example, try getting hal to automount a cd based on a given label, with 
currently running user on path below home directory, rather then /media. Maybe 
you can, but I doubt it. In fact, using glabel will present you with multiple 
notification dialogs out of the box.

I can get done exactly what I want, by using native freebsd devd and ditching 
hal and I have a second option of using amd, except then I have a buggy 
working Xorg server if it's working at all.

Anyway, here's a nice rant about hal, that I think represents how a lot of 
long time users of FreeBSD on the desktop feel, that may or may not give you 
some different perspectives:
http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-current/2009-April/005758.html
-- 
Mel