[MiNT] Mount - my two cents :)

[maurits@bassment.demon.nl]

Mario wrote:

> I AM NOT proposing that I know anything about this, or what is better or
> worse, but rather I am merely stating what AS A USER I observe about MiNT.

And I agree with you. The reason I am defending mount *as a general
idea* and am claiming MiNT's way of doing it is flaky, is because MiNT
lacks a system of being aware of removable drives (not) being there. The
things Mario wrote clearly point out the problems with that (for example
the possibility of a program writing to a disk just after sync but
before the eject - and then of course it could also happen AFTER the
eject). A simple forced-mediachange doesn't help there.

The stories about instable mount-systems in Linux or Solaris or whatever
are all totally irrelevant. They would only matter if we were to port
their mount commands directly, which of course would be silly because of
the totally different nature of the operating systems. MiNT does indeed
sorta "automount" all devices which is TOS' nature and I think changing
that would be a bit drastic. What we do need is some sort of system to
report the  availability or absence of removable devices to the
operating system. Whether you call it mounting or anything else doesn't
matter. This would solve "inode not written out when drive ..
invalidated" errors and undetected floppy changes.

This is really all I meant with the statement that mount isn't that bad.
:) Of course we wouldn't need to specify the filesystem type in a mount
command. MiNT already detects it automatically, why change that?

My two cents :)

Maurits.