device-automounter moved to kdereview

[Sven Burmeister]

Am Samstag, 15. August 2009 15:47:06 schrieb Kevin Ottens:
> On Sunday 9 August 2009 21:34:45 Trever Fischer wrote:
> > I've moved device-automounter out of playground and into kdereview. After
> > the review, I hope for it to end up in kdebase/runtime/solid/.
>
> Shouldn't be a problem I guess if we can agree on a few changes. :-)
>
> > Then after that, I hope to combine it with the solid-actions-kcm to let
> > it handle other automatic execution of actions when devices get attached.
>
> Well, at least for the configuration parts that looks like the way to go.
> All this stuff should be presented at one place (from the user pov). You'll
> probably have to discuss with Ben Cooksley for that who is in charge of the
> action kcm.
>
> BTW, most of the people working on the hardware related topics are on kde-
> hardware-devel so you probably want to register there.
>
> > device-automounter is a small kded plugin and kcm page that adds
> > removable media automounting to KDE. Its more than blindly automatic,
> > since it has a little bit more logic (further describe in the SETTINGS
> > file) to make it smarter than your average automounter, while still
> > behaving without configuration as a naive user would expect.
>
> I took a look at it and it's mostly doing it blindly albeit a few
> heuristics as you mentionned. In any case that's the kind of stuff which
> can't work in a multi-user environment, and it can also cause troubles when
> someone is deleting/creating/formatting partitions. So here is my (short)
> list of proposed changes.

About the former. How many computers that run KDE are real multi-user 
environments, i.e. two or more users logged in at the same time?

> 2) AutomountEnabled should have false by default. So that means that (with
> the previous change) automounting is completely shutdown by default. We
> can't really afford having something doing automounting enabled by default
> for the reasons I pointed out above (multi-user envs, formatting, etc.)

I disagree at least in parts because I claim that newbies and "normal" users, 
i.e. those with less knowledge should be the ones defaults aim at. So I'd 
consider it harder for a newbie finding out why his device does not get 
automounted then for an advanced user to disable it for real multi-user 
environments, be it at home or even more so in an enterprise. About the 
formatting and partition creating issues, what are these and how likely are 
they to affect the normal user?

There should be some discussion about the actual cases where this can lead to 
problems and better ways around them than just disabling this useful feature.

Sven