Shall we support the autorun feature?

[Martin Alderson]

I don't think Apple is a great example of how to do this (I'm typing
this on my iBook, so I'm no Apple-hater). It's extremely limited and
offers very little customization, with the 'drag install' method (with
a DMG file). The OSX Installer (.pkg file) is better, but it's also
not very flexible (for example, it's pretty useless for a
'configuration cd', like an ISP may provide when all they need is a
simple shell script to set some options).


On Tue, 04 Jan 2005 09:04:05 -0600, Jerry Haltom <wasabi at larvalstage.net> wrote:
> 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>
> 
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