Shall we support the autorun feature?

Jerry Haltom jhaltom at feedbackplusinc.com
Tue Jan 4 10:08:51 CST 2005


What's that have to do about the autorun though?

On Tue, 2005-01-04 at 15:13 +0000, Martin Alderson wrote:
> 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>
> > 
> > -- 
> > ubuntu-devel mailing list
> > ubuntu-devel at lists.ubuntu.com
> > http://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel
> >
> 
-- 
Jerry Haltom <wasabi at larvalstage.net>
Feedback Plus, Inc.




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