2013/8/5 François Andriot <francois.andriot@free.fr>

Hello,
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 ?

Hi, about a week ago I've told Tim quite similar concerns in private mail... I'm currently working on the moving tdehwlib's code to standalone shared library out of tdecore and splitting it into several backends. I've started with udisks2 support and nearly finished with it. Unfortunately I run into the fact that tdehw part of media kioslave is nailed to pmount. So it will require some testing and accept it to release during code-freeze stage isn't a good idea. Moreover It would break some tdelibs API, which is not supposed to be during R14 lifecycle, so as I consider It won't be introduced before R15. On the other hand, is it so important? TDE is used by only few people around the world, and a small API breakage between R14.x releases won't be so painful IMO.

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 ?

1) It supposed to be if you build tdebase with -DWITH_HAL=ON and -DWITH_TDEHWLIB=OFF. But I can't promise that, because I couldn't make hal to work with recent kernels...

2) There is no such notes for tdelibs yet, but for over modules there are comments in CMakeLists.txt. They define which modules are affected by certain flags. In most cases it's quite easy to guess what functionality they switch. Some of them also have description and NOTE's. Also you cat grep sources for WITH_* and in most of cases HAVE_* macroses.

As for udisks option, for now they used only for eject CD tray's (and may be other media).

Up to 3.5.13.x, the situation seemed clear: without HAL, there was no alternative :-)

Thanks
Francois