F8devel - Review HAL policy about hiding partitions

[Kevin Kofler]

Otto Rey <otto_rey <at> yahoo.com.ar> writes:
> Why we continue hiding partitions with HAL policy
> (/usr/share/hal/fdi/policy/10osvendor/
> 99-redhat-storage-policy-fixed-drives.fdi)??

Call me old-fashioned, but IMHO mounting of fixed disk partitions is 
what /etc/fstab is for. (And I'm not even a sysadmin, just a home user 
adminning my own machines.)

> It's for security?

Not only, see the bug report this was discussed in. The other problems with the 
automounting were:
* mountpoint not easily settable (An easy way to set a HAL policy fixing the 
mountpoint could help there. But you'll still see resistance from sysadmins who 
won't understand why they have to learn a new way when /etc/fstab has worked 
fine for ages.)
* default mountpoint can be different across reboots (Is this problem resolved 
yet? Fixed partitions should really be mounted to the same place at each 
reboot.)
* "updating" of ext2/ext3 partitions containing older GNU/Linux distributions 
with new ext3 features, making those fail to boot (I see no easy solution for 
this one.)

IMHO, the best way to deal with fixed disk partitions would be to offer an easy 
setting to add them to fstab within Anaconda, or maybe firstboot. I really 
don't understand the advantage of HAL over fstab for fixed disks. HAL is great 
for stuff which can be unplugged or inserted at runtime, but we're talking 
about fixed disk drives here.

        Kevin Kofler