[arch-general] change in mount behaviour?

[Guus Snijders]

On 28-01-12 17:29, Heiko Baums wrote:
> Am Sat, 28 Jan 2012 15:09:30 +0100
> schrieb Tom Gundersen<teg at 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