Shall we support the autorun feature?

[Jerry Haltom]

Now that this conversation comes up... what does Apple do?

I can't remember ever seeing an Apple CD autorun... they just open
automatically, and have a big Click Here To Install icon (just a
launcher).

I just bring this up to say, if Apple can do without it, so can we.

I vote for 1.

On Tue, 2005-01-04 at 11:36 +0100, Martin Pitt wrote:
> 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
> 
-- 
Jerry Haltom <wasabi at larvalstage.net>