/media versus /mnt

[James McKenzie]

James Wilkinson wrote:

>James McKenzie wrote:
>  
>
>>/media is File Hierarchy Standard compliant.  /mnt is depreciated (means 
>>no longer supported).  But you should be able to create /mnt mount 
>>points if you feel more comfortable with them.  I have not installed 
>>FC3, yet, but I think that I can get used to using /media vice /mnt.
>>    
>>
>
>I don't think /mnt is deprecated as such.
>
>Fifteen or twenty years ago, Unix machines tended not to have CD drives
>or floppy drives. And many Unix computers with floppies tend not to put
>filesystems on them.
>
>If you wanted to get data onto or off a Unix computer, you used a tape.
>And you do *not* want to try putting a filesystem on a tape -- not when
>the seek time can be measured in *hours*.
>
>/mnt was specified as a generic place to "temporarily" mount
>filesystems.
>
>That changed. Unixes gained the ability to mount CDs and (often)
>floppies, and got /cdrom, /floppy, and similar mount points.  But Linux
>on multi-boot computers started getting /dos1, /dos2, and similar
>mountpoints as well, and it all became a muddle. So, as I recall, Red
>Hat started placing all these mount points under /mnt. And Red Hat-based
>Linux distros (notably SuSE and Mandrake) followed suit.  Slackware and
>Debian along with the BSDs and others didn't.
>
>So began a flame war that earlier versions of the FHS and the FSSTND
>(its predecessor) ignored (or took no position on).
>
>/media is an attempt at a compromise: it is the old Red Hat /mnt
>renamed, leaving /mnt free as a "Mount point for a temporarily mounted
>filesystem".
>
>James.
>  
>
I thought that FHS was addressing this 'descrepency' by adding /media 
for media mount points, again leaving /mnt for those devices that 
'disconnect' such as tape drives (btw, who uses a tape drive on a small 
system these days?)

Anyway, adding this after years of /mnt can and does lead to confusion.  
Of course you can always move the associated devices back over to /mnt 
from /media.  Again, this can lead to other headaches.

James McKenzie