[MiNT] Mount and MiNT

[Mario Becroft <mb@tos.pl.net>]

I have been reading all the recent messages about mount under MiNT and I
must say that I find it a bit difficult to see how many of these abstract
discussions relate to real life.

The floppy drive in my TT hasn't been working for about a year, but
nevertheless I would be interested in an explanation of the following
points.

When I was using a 270 MB Syquest removable drive under MiNT, it was
always a problem because although I would use sync before removing the
disc, I always got error mesages on the screen after removing the disc, I
can't remember the wording of the message now but it was something like
"<something> not written out after drive invalidated." Despite this I
seldom lost any data, but it is disconcerting. But maybe this is fixed in
more recent MiNT versions.

The next thing is, if I sync the disc, there is, as I understand it,
nothing to prevent some program from still accessing the disc after the
sync command is finished, but before I eject the disc. Whereas if the disc
could be unmounted then this would prevent a program from accessing the
disc between when it is unmounted and when the disc is ejected.

You say, in answer to this, that if the cache is not flushed then the disc
is locked, but I have yet to see a floppy disc drive on the Atari which
can be locked!

And what, then, happens if the disc is removed entirely? Under MiNT, every
time I list the directory of drive U, either with ls or using the desktop,
it takes quite a long time, during which the computer entirely ceases to
respond to user input, while the non-existent disc is interrogated,
whereas surely if the disc could be unmounted then MiNT would know about
the non-existence of the disc and not waste time trying to access it.

Also, what ever anyone may say it seems to me that using symbolic links to
make different drives accessible from certain locations is imperfect.
Maybe mounting drives at given locations is worse still, I do not know any
deep technical reason for any of this, but merely what I observe in every
day use of my TT under MiNT, namely that with symbolic links there are
always two different paths that may reference the same directory, either
the actual drive which it is on or else the path where the symbolic link
is; and that depending on the program, accessing the parent directory may
access one or the other of these two possible directories. To me this is
confusing, especially for a user who is not familiar with the physical
layout of the discs but merely wants to use the system in the usual way.

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.

I hope it is of some relevance to the topic.

-- 
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| Mario Becroft                * Tariland, New Zealand Atari User Group |
| mb@tos.pl.net                * Atari Hardware Developments            |
| http://www.ak.planet.gen.nz/~mario/ * Atari Serial Mouse Interface    |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------+