file system mount

[David Zeuthen]

On Fri, 2007-11-02 at 13:56 +1100, Rodd Clarkson wrote:
> I've had a collection of mounts on my HD that I hadn't seen show up in
> f7, but were showing in rawhide in the disk mounter applet.
> 
> The mounts included:
> 
> '/' (I'm using '/1' for this install),

Stems from another OS on your hard disk.

> '/var' (which should be '/var/www' anyway, and was already mounted
> as /var/www in my filesystem),

I bet the label of the file system is /var - that's what we display.

> '/mnt/vmware' (which was mounted and already a part of my filesystem),
> and
> 
> '/boot' (this install of rawhide has '/boot' as part of '/1')

Again, from another OS.

> and aren't the sort of thing I would have thought should have been
> showing up as available.

Why not? These are partitions on your hard disk. We simply just show
them as of F8. Now, you can complain that the text used in the UI for
these are misleading and I have to agree. We just take it from the label
of the file system at this point [1]. So go complain to the people who
chose the labels on your behalf. [2]

(Oh, and we also hide mounts for mount points at well-known locations,
e.g. FHS2.3 and some oddities like /var/log/audit and /var/tmp.)

So to fix this, either relabel these file systems (man e2label) but
please be careful to update the /etc/fstab files of the OS's using them
since Fedora defaults to LABEL=. Eventually we'll get the "rename file
system" from the UI going and this should be a lot easier.

      David

[1] : We could be more creative and try to guess what the file system is
used for; e.g. look for /etc/fedora-release, /etc/debian_release and so
forth (including trying to guess if it's Windows XP, Mac OS X or
whatever). So instead of showing "/" we could show "Fedora Core 7
(Moonshine)". That approach has it's ups and downs (guess is dangerous)
thus why it's not implemented at this point.

[2] : This is a rant to the Anaconda team. It is beyond me why you guys
decided to use LABEL= when UUID= is available for ext2/ext3 like since
forever. Another complaint is the name chosen for the file systems;
instead of e.g. "/" maybe you could use "F8-/", "F8-/var/www" etc. I
know this screws people on updates but at least these people could
rename the labels (e.g. from "F8-/" to "F9-/") when they upgrade. Or
Anaconda could prompt the user. Thanks for looking into this.