Shall we support the autorun feature?

[Martin Pitt]

Hi folks!

Bug #1956 deserves a public discussion, so let's do that here.

Gnome proper offers a so-called "autorun" feature for removable media.
If enabled in gnome-volume-manager (disabled by default), g-v-m checks
if a file "autorun" or "autorun.sh" is present and executable on newly
mounted media. If so, the file is automatically executed.

However, since pmount mounts non-fstab drives with "noexec", this
currently fails. So the question arises what we want to do with
autorun in the future. I see the following options:

1. Completely disable: pmount with noexec (as now), remove
   the configuration option from gvm
2. enable: pmount with exec (should work automatically then)
3. enable with confirmation dialog: pmount with exec, change g-v-m to
   confirm execution

I don't really like 3 because confirmation dialogs tend to get ignored
and they do not tell you what exactly will be performed anyway. I
doubt that many users would want to actually read the shell code (let
alone analyze a binary) before executing it.

My personal preference is option 1.

It should be noted that our only use case so far - automatic Ubuntu CD
upgrades - does not need this feature. This was solved by a hal script
that checks whether an inserted CD is an Ubuntu one.

Any opinions about this?

Thanks,

Martin

-- 
Martin Pitt                       http://www.piware.de
Ubuntu Developer            http://www.ubuntulinux.org
Debian GNU/Linux Developer       http://www.debian.org
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