Are file permissions in files on external devices silly?

[Felipe Figueiredo]

On Fri, 2008-11-21 at 19:42 +0100, Marcin 'Qrczak' Kowalczyk wrote:
> 2008/11/21 Martin Pitt <martin.pitt at ubuntu.com>:
> 
> > For removable drives, once the kernel supports uid=/gid= options for
> > hfs+ (Mac) and ext3 (other Linuxes), they can be trivially applied
> > automatically in hal if a device is detected as removable. The hard
> > part is to get kernel support for it.
> 
> This should not be done unconditionally. I mount a USB drive with an
> ext3 filesystem and make a backup to it using rsync. The backup should
> continue to preserve permissions.

If I understand it correctly, the proposal outlined by Martin Pitt is to
definitively change the whole concept of removable media, and make it
clear they are to be treated differently as static media. 

If this is the case, you shouldn't use a removable media for an rsync
backup - you should be using a "static unpluggable" media instead
(probably using UUIDs in fstab). I understand this is all semantics
play, but this is exactly what is proposed to change, right?

regards
FF