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 If pmount is no longer maintained upstream, and if pmount is the only palatable method for supporting tdehwlib, then perhaps we ought to slip pmount into our dependencies tree.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