Shall we support the autorun feature?

[Martin Alderson]

I'm just saying it's not as flexible as allowing the CD-author to
include a shell script or binary which can be much more powerful. OSX
is not always the best to copy off.


On Tue, 04 Jan 2005 10:08:51 -0600, Jerry Haltom
<jhaltom at feedbackplusinc.com> wrote:
> 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.
> 
>