Make NTFS support rocks on ubuntu

[flomertens at gmail.com]

Hello all,

I switched to feisty some days ago, and overall my experience has been
quite impressive.
Nevertheless, i found that NTFS support was quite poor and in fact was
in regression compare to edgy :

- mounting NTFS external device is impossible : default options are
umask=222,utf8 but utf8 is not allowed by hal for NTFS.

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/hal/+bug/78142

- the patch (from upstream git) to support fuse in hal has been drop
during the merge, and so the use of new ntfs driver like ntfs-3g or
ntfs-fuse is difficult.

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/hal/+bug/35354

- gnome-mount needs sane default settings for ntfs-3g and ntfs-fuse. It
also need a little change so that it can handle the "locale=" option
which replace the "utf8" option in ntfs-3g and ntfs-fuse.

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-mount/+bug/78375

- hal need to allow locale= option for ntfs, so that ntfs-3g and
ntfs-fuse can be use it with gnome-mount.

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/hal/+bug/78370


For all those bug, i propose a small patch or an easy fix, so the only
things to do to make NTFS support rocks is somebody to implement them.
To make life of people easie, i tagged all those bug with "ntfs-support"

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bugs?field.tag=ntfs-support



On a side note, i started to rewrite the WriteSupportForNTFS spec :
- in fact i didn't really like it on it first incarnation.
- it needed to integer the latest change (gnome-mount...)

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/WriteSupportForNTFS%28new%29

The implementation design is now separate in two stage :
- Make ntfs read/write support available for mounting internal &
external device.
- Make ntfs read/write support default for all device.
The first stage is basically fixing the above bug so that ntfs-3g and
ntfs-fuse can be easily use for mounting internal & external device
The second stage need some thinking.

Best regards.

Flo