[Thunar-dev] automount

[Benedikt Meurer]

Peter wrote:
>>>I may be totally off my rocker here, but I remember something about
>>>Ubuntu putting DBUS stuff in user (erm, non-root) space.  What if I run
>>>the following commands:
>>>
>>>su $familymember
>>>Thunar --display=:0
>>>
>>>I really don't know enough about DBUS to tell if this would be a problem
>>>when doing automountish stuff.  Would this create multiple instances of
>>>Thunar?  If you would, please enlighten the noob ;)..
>>>
>>
>>You are confusing things here. The Ubuntu/Debian story is about the
>>system bus. Thunar's D-BUS service uses the session bus.
> 
> So, Thunar is in the session bus, but uses HAL which is in the system
> bus?  If this is the case, then running Thunar in two different X
> sessions would create two instances of Thunar.  In this case there could
> be race conditions and such for automounting.  I'm just trying to point
> out another case for the daemon.  Diarrhea of the mouth.
> 
> IMHO, the desktop should have nothing to do with automounting.  Sure,
> communicate with user-space about devices, but why _the desktop_?  Are
> we too good for Midnight Commander now?  Barring that (Plenty of people
> have thought through this more than I have) wouldn't a desktop-agnostic
> automount daemon be more suitable?  Perhaps a way for distributions to
> create their own auto-mount around a fairly simple framework?  Food for
> thought, or maybe I should just cap it ;).

I somehow fail to see your point, what does midnight commander has to do
with automounting... so I'll just list the facts:

You need user interaction here (i.e. to enter passwords, etc.), which is
currently done by gnome-mount (or will be done). You'll also need user
interaction for the autostart-spec in some cases. You cannot expect
users to change to the vt after inserting a new volume to see if any
user interaction is required.

You'll also need $DISPLAY to actually start the appropriate
applications. I.e. for the autostart-spec, launch the handler, falling
back to Thunar to just display the volume's content. For VideoCDs/DVDs,
you'll need to run Xfmedia. And so on. Where do you get display from?
Testing for running Xservers? What about remote Xservers? And if you
find more than one Xserver, which one should be used? And if you don't
have permissions to connect to the Xserver?

There are a bunch of other things that simply don't make sense, but it's
getting late... so to sum up, "auto-mounting" doesn't make sense w/o
$DISPLAY, unless you (a) really only want to mount it[1], which is
pretty useless IMHO, as that way it would also be mounted automatically
if you click on it in Thunar, and (b) know exactly what devices are
going to be used (which would require a glass sphere for distributors).

Benedikt

[1] You could also just use amd then, or a stupid script that watches
dmesg output and tries to mount stuff blindly. There are several hacks
like this, and google knows where to find them.