device-automounter moved to kdereview

[Sven Burmeister]

Am Montag, 17. August 2009 08:29:09 schrieb Jos Poortvliet:
> On Mon, Aug 17, 2009 at 8:09 AM, Kevin Ottens<ervin at kde.org> wrote:
> > On Sunday 16 August 2009 23:04:01 Sven Burmeister wrote:
> >> > 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.
> >
> > Except that the use case for that are people with knowledge about what
> > mount/unmount is and want to access their device *now* from the console
> > without mounting first. Those obviously have enough knowledge to turn on
> > the automount and I don't plan to optimize for them (I'm one of those
> > BTW).
> >
> > For all the other users out there, the "mount on demand" as it is
> > implemented right now is enough. Anywhere you could access a device from
> > the UI we mount as soon as the user tries to make a first access attempt.
> > It's not like they need to know what mounting is...
>
> You know this falls flat on it's face with session restore? I get
> plenty of 'folder not accessible' messages every time I log in...
>
> Maybe see what the usability ppl have to say about auto mounting or
> not. I see how ppl who aren't very knowledgeable might need
> automounting by default, and I see how it could hurt them...

Other examples are that because photos and music collections are that big, 
people might keep them on external harddrives, so if they start digikam, they 
have to mount the external harddrive first. They might even need to close 
amarok and digikam before logging out because otherwise they get errors during 
the next login.

Those photos might even be indexed by nepomuk, i.e. scanned right after 
logging in, or for a wallpaper slideshow etc.

Forcing them to add those disks to fstab is not really a solution and I bet 
that most of those users would then run into trouble if they unplugged the hdd 
once and wonder why the booting fails.

If multi-user environments are really that much trouble and not the exception 
to the rule of computer usage, then the solution would be to enable KDE to 
know when more than one user is logged in and suspend automounting only in 
that case by default.

Sven