On 28 Oct 2006, at 10:59 pm, Ulrich Eckhardt wrote:
Package: am-utils
Version: 6.1.5-2
Severity: wishlist
Greetings!
I'm currently looking for something that mounts CDs automatically
and came
across the am-utils package. I believe it can mount CDs or
floppies, but I'm
not sure.
It can, yes. You can use it to automount pretty much any kind of
filesystem, although I personally have never used it for mounting
local devices. I've certainly made sure I build the Debian package
with support for physical devices.
That is also my criticism: In the package description, it should
mention that it both manages network filesystems and local
filesystems like
CDs and floppies, unless it can't, which I'm still not sure about.
Further,
the fact that I still can't say if it really does that is somehow
striking,
how can it be that this is hidden so deeply in the documentation?
I think it's probably just a by-product of what 99.9% of people use
it for.
Now, assuming it can mount CDs, I'd also expect that to be a
primary use for
it and it should be documented as one typical example (e.g. in
section 11 of
the included HTML docs or as an example setup script).
We've tried using it mount USB drives at work, and actually it
doesn't do a very good job of it. It works fine automounting local
filesystems which you expect to remain mounted forever once you've
mounted them (so I'd have no problems with using amd to automount
local fixed disks) but when we tried using it for USB drives we came
across a snag, and that is the automatic unmounting. For local
removable media, you want the unmounting to happen quite quickly
after you stop using the device, but typically with NFS filesystems
you want them to hang around for a while (especially in large
installations). Unfortunately, there's no way to specify separate
unmount intervals for different mount types, so it just didn't work
for us, and I suspect this problem would also bite other users.
In the case it can't mount CDs, I'd at least mention that it is
designed to
mount network filesystems and perhaps even suggest a different tool
for
CD/floppies.
Such as the stuff that Gnome and KDE come with?
I'll have a think about your suggestion and see what I can come up with.
Tim
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