6 Aug
2013
6 Aug
'13
7:31 a.m.
I've seen that the "pmount" utility is
used in TDE R14 for
removable
devices.
I've also seen that this utility is NOT provided at all in some
distributions, e.g. Mageia 3.
Questions:
1) If pmount does not exist, is there any alternative in TDE R14
to
mount/umount devices ? (I'd say no, because I have an error
message
saying pmount was not found)
2) This utility looks like it is not maintained anymore upstream.
I've
built 0.9.99-alpha, and it works but needs some patches. Could we
import
into our Git to have our own "TDE-certified" pmount utility ?
3) Could'nt udisks2 do the same as pmount ?
And some more questions about R14 new features ...
1) Is HAL/Halbackend code still entirely present ? (for old distro
NOT
having udisks, upower, etc ... but having HAL out of the box)
2) Do we have a summary of "what libraries are used for" in
tdelibs/tdebase ? For example, if I build with "udisks" but no
"udisks2"
support, what feature will I lose exactly ? And what alternatives
do I
have ?
Up to 3.5.13.x, the situation seemed clear: without HAL, there was
no
alternative :-)
Many months ago when I started testing tdehwlibs with Tim, I too
noticed the pmount requirement. The package is not part of the
stock Slackware but easily compiled and installed in Slackware.
Nonetheless, that pmount is not a standard package in many distros
does raise the question of how to best handle that discrepancy. If
pmount is no longer maintained upstream, and if pmount is the only
palatable method for supporting tdehwlib, then perhaps we ought to
slip pmount into our dependencies tree. We have libart_gpl as a
precendent for such a move.
I'm using pmount 0.93, which is the current stable version.
If there are alternatives to pmount, that nonetheless means
extensive rewrites and testing. We already have enough on our plate
to get R14.0.0 out the door in a timely fashion, and progress
toward that has somewhat stalled of late. Replacing pmount also
likely means an ABI change and according to our new versioning
scheme, would mean such changes should wait until R14.1.0 (and not
R14.0.1, which would be a bug-fix and maintenance release).
As Alexander noted in another response, Trinity can be compiled
with HAL or TDEHWLIB support, but not both. For a couple of months
I built both ways as Slackware 13.1 uses HAL and 14.0 uses the
udisks framework. I'm no longer using 13.1 and can't say how well
we've maintained HAL support. I now only use 14.0 and I am not
experiencing any serious problems with tdehwlib.
Darrell