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by ppurka 4147 days ago
One of the sources of this problem is the relentless experimenting that has been ongoing since about 2007-2008. First, there was pmount and hal introduced to take care this automounting, and as soon as this was in a working state, it got replaced by devicekit. Soon after, devicekit was abandoned in favor of a combination of udev, consolekit, policykit. Then then policykit got replaced by polkit. And then systemd was introduced and consolekit got abandoned. And each time the documentation gets worse (except for systemd, since the authors try to justify their choices).

Overall, it has been a sequence of constant rewriting, and I don't see an end to it. People who have been using rolling distributions like Gentoo and administer their own machines are the most affected. If one is not using the whole systemd to major DE (KDE, Gnome, XFCE, etc) stack, it is arduous to set up a mounting system which always works. Usually, vfat external disks tend to be immediately writable on mount. Move over to exfat, mtp, ext[234], or another other native filesystem and it is an exercise in exasperation to get them to mount as read-write as an unprivileged user, or even mount at all as an unprivileged user (see https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=15875).

The only decent program that I have found that works quite reliably is udevil.

3 comments

Basically because udevil don't buy into the whole "fine grained security" wankery that seems to be coming out of the corporate/government world. It may well have started with SELinux, and as best i can tell Fedora has always been at the forefront of pushing it.
I recently redid my Arch install and I'm mounting usb drives on a user account thats just in the wheel group no problem with pretty much any filesystem (ufs, ntfs, fat32, btrfs, ext4, f2fs).

I agree that the rewrites all the time were annoying, but I have a hard time seeing systemd developers rewriting the same part of their project over and over now. For better or worse systemd should at least slow churn.

Well, since before that, really.. I can remember the early attempts at automounting back around '98 or '99, IRC. Previously: http://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html
Heh. From what i have seen elsewhere, jwz and at least one high up within Gnome has some antagonism going between them.