GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 585423
per-mount options
Last modified: 2018-09-21 16:45:48 UTC
There are various corner cases that could be implemented or eased by having options to mounts. Examples: - increasing (or reducing) timeouts - like for sftp'ing to a Mars rover - specifying filename encoding with ftp I'm opening this bug to track progress on this and so other bugs can depend on it.
Somewhat unrelated: I have thought about this in the context of mounting block-devices e.g. hard disks, usb sticks and optical discs. But I came to the conclusion we don't need it there; this message sums up my thoughts on that http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/devkit-devel/2009-June/000225.html Notably, note that neither OS X nor Windows supports mount options for block devices; except Windows support something like [*] Optimize for quick removal [ ] Optimize for performance for hotpluggable/removable devices. Note that this is a departure from earlier GNOME releases where gnome-mount allowed you to configure mount options. The UI was a real trainwreck http://people.freedesktop.org/~david/gnome-mount-ntfs-fuse.png http://people.freedesktop.org/~david/gnome-mount-properties-0.01.png but that's probably more a UI design issue. I mean, the GTK+ print dialog have shown it's possible to create UIs that still scales even with a stupendous amount of options. That said, I can see this being useful to specify filename encodings for networked filesystems like ftp and Samba. Before writing any code, I would begin with thinking about what the user experience and the UI would look like. Anyway, if we implement this we should make sure that it can also be used for configuring mount options for block devices (which are not really GVfs filesystems), e.g. we can reuse the same UI in Nautilus or whatever. For example, it might make sense to have something like "Optimize for quick removal / performance" (or maybe even a way to configure the IO elevator) though I don't think it's super important nor necessarily a sane thing to do.
Per-filesystem mount options would really be great to. eg. I want to be able to set all NTFS volumes mounted to have a particular fmask, dmask and gid options set.
I hope this comes off as more of an argument for mount options in gvfs than a rant, but I guess if I have to qualify it, you already know what you're going to get. :-) I for one was really excited to see the gnome mount options when they appeared. Sure they needed work, but I'd hoped it was the start of a push toward simple graphical tools for configuration that occasionally need to be done but shouldn't require the user to edit a system configuration file, potentially borking the system. Then the UI promptly disappeared again and I was sad. As things stand though, while I would be happy to see user configurable per block device and per gvfs filesystem mounts, I think users should at least have the ability to control the default mount options for -- in my case -- NTFS and VFAT block devices. For example, I had to write a script to rename and chmod all the photos copied from my memory cards and have to run it every time I copy photos to my hard disk. Sure, I can edit fstab and create individual mounts for each of my cards (since I can't guarantee consistent device paths) but if I need to format one of them, I've got to do it again. This may seem to be more of a case for changing the defaults, which would solve my immediate problems, but I've had to make exceptions for this disk or that disk because Linux is case sensitive. I think that having a way to change these default mount options is valuable, even if I have to dig into gconf or a (user specific) config file. Windows gets away without so few mount options by existing in a world where they have a fairly effective monopoly and can therefor treat compatibility with other systems as optional at best here. Windows has the same problem with codepages in VFAT filesystems as in Linux, but even Windows has mechanisms in the registry to tweak mount options. Microsoft manages to sidestep the case sensitivity issue by virtue of compatibility with its MS-DOS ancestry, whereas Linux is charged with being compatible with as much as possible and is expected to adapt to the ways of Windows. And what rant would be complete without some anecdotal evidence to back up my arguments? Well, let's just say the case-sensitivity issue seems to affect more people trying out Linux than I would have thought. Having some way to change the default auto-mount options would have saved me some apologising for this Linux thing I keep talking about.
It's quite limiting to not even have the option of passing mount options to gvfs-mount on the command line. This means gvfs-mount is not usable in many cases e.g. when trying to mount an NTFS volume of a hibernated system. I would like to be able to mount such volumes read-only but that's not possible using gvfs-mount.
(In reply to florian.rathgeber from comment #4) > It's quite limiting to not even have the option of passing mount options to > gvfs-mount on the command line. This means gvfs-mount is not usable in many > cases e.g. when trying to mount an NTFS volume of a hibernated system. I > would like to be able to mount such volumes read-only but that's not > possible using gvfs-mount. It would be nice to have this implemented in gio/gvfs api. However mount options for block devices can by easily changed in UI using gnome-disk-utility, or you can use mount command for such cases...
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