CDs mount to volume name

[Michal Jaegermann]

On Wed, Feb 08, 2006 at 02:17:11PM -0500, Jeff Spaleta wrote:
> 
> Its difficult to do a second mount to a second location of your
> choosing via a mount command?

No, it is not difficult for _me_.  OTOH in the real life I had to
deal, not once and not twice, with some who one would think should
know better but exactly changes in how things are getting mounted
created for them serious obstacles.

> Last time I checked(3 minutes ago) you
> can do your own mounts as needed no matter what the desktop
> automounter is doing.

In other words you are telling now that we simply should ignore
automounter.  Maybe a partially good advice but why we needed it
then in the first place?  This is actually is a pretty bad idea in
case of USB devices as you do not know in advance which device you
will get (it is enough to disconnect and reconnect and it may move)
so your claim that you can edit fstab in advance fails flat on its
face.

Now assume that a user has a script to scp some files from a USB key
to a remote machine (this is a real life example and even "mission
critical").  We will have tons of fun to handle that.

Other consequence is that 'eject' command for non-root stops
working.  Quite nasty.  Even if you "double mounted" your CD then
the other mount is still active and you will not have an access to
it as it is not in fstab.  Unmounting other media in a script for a
non-root also looks like a bundle of joy.  grep through an output of
mount, guess correctly what device we may be dealing with and use
'gnome-mount -e ...'?  Maybe.  Does this work if an access is remote
and a desktop is nowhere is sight?  Who knows.  What is somebody
followed your advice and has the same media mounted many times?
Conditional execution when this happens to be a system which does
not have a gnome desktop or maybe an older, saner, version?  Tons of
puzzles and a very "productive" time ahead for those who have to
deal with real installations.

In any case on my test system this whole automount bundle is quite
far from operational in any form so I can only try to guess.

I understand perfectly why fstab-sync is a hack and why one would
want to replace it with something saner.  Only it seems that the
cure in the current shape is far worse than the original affliction.

I still scratch my head what you are gaining by mounting removable
media at some pseudo-random locations.  They are effectively random
as a volume name is not apparent from a shape of some CD.  It may
even be empty.  As it was noted on a desktop you have a label with
that volume name anyway.

   Michal