On 28-01-12 17:29, Heiko Baums wrote:
Am Sat, 28 Jan 2012 15:09:30 +0100 schrieb Tom Gundersen<teg@jklm.no>:
Apologies for the late reply, but the length of the thread kept me off for a while. [...]
The different usecases of /media and /mnt are explained in the FHS link you provided.
I don't see any difference there. Optical media contain a filesystem and harddisks contain filesystems. Both are usually mounted temporarily. So what's the difference?
There is actually a *HUGE* difference, but there is also some history involved in this. I don't have links handy, but i'm sure google can help you out here. Also, this is just my understanding of it, so YMMV. First: harddisk were considered fixed. If they were there when the system started up, one could mostly assume they would stay there. Besides those "always there" blockdevices, there were also CD-ROMs with their removable media. Since the *device* would probably stay where it was, it was easy to create an entry in /etc/fstab for those so users could use them and rely on where they would show up. Some distro's chose to use /mnt as a mountpoint for CD-Roms, some others created subdirectories below /mnt. Despite these small differences, the general behavior was well understood and workable. Then came USB (and other removable) storage and the trouble began. Now there were *devices* that would appear and disappear while the system was still running. I think that there were a couple of solutions to handle this situation, but no real standard. I'm not sure how the standardization went, but it ended up with the current /media hierarchy. No more fixed entries in /etc/fstab to allow users to mount and use those devices, but dynamically created mountpoints and possibly also auto-mounting. This way the system doesn't need any info on possible storage media beforehand, but everything is created on the fly, when needed. Quite a nice and elegant solution, if you ask me. With this in mind, the FHS decisions seem fairly logical: - /mnt is used in different ways, so it's best to steer away from it - /media is where we mount removable storage. It has not (much) tradition behind it, so it's easy to create a new standard with it. Hope that helps. mvg, Guus