[arch-dev-public] [RFC] the future of /media

[Tom Gundersen]

Hi guys,

With udisks2 being used by gnome, and about to be used by the next
KDE, some people have raised concerns about the transition from
udisks1 to udisks2.

The issue is:

udisks1 mounts your devices to /media, whereas udisks2 will mount them
to /run/media/$user.

There are very good reasons for this change (mainly security), but the
fact remains that it causes problems on upgrade for people who have
hard-coded these paths [0].

On a single-user system, the problem could simply be solved by
symlinking /media to /run/media/$user. On multi-user systems one would
have to add one symlink per device to /media. Either way, this is
something the local admin would have to deal with and not anything we
can do.

What we can do, however, is to avoid problems on upgrades of the
filesystem package by not shipping /media on udisks1-free systems.

I suggest that we move /media from the filesystem to the udisks
package, allowing everyone else to do what they wish locally. We would
also need to post a news item (hopefully not quite as rambling as this
email) explaining what has happened and what people might want to do.

Comments?

Cheers,

Tom

PS
This problem is probably a lot smaller than it appears, as our gnome
packages made the switch to udisks2 quite some time ago, but at least
I have not seen any serious bug reports until now.

[0]: <https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=1197065#p1197065>