[Pkg-utopia-maintainers] Bug#518711: Should validate /media/.hal-mtab at startup

[Sylvain Joyeux]

Package: hal
Version: 0.5.11-8
Severity: normal


Right now, /media/.hal-mtab is left as-is by startup scripts, and is not
validated by hal. What happened to me is that there where two leftovers from
previous sessions, declaring that my DVD drive was mounted.

When I (or another user on the same machine) was doing a mount, it was appended
to .hal-mtab. Unfortunately, hal-storage finds entries in this mtab based on the
device name, not the mount point or volume UID, and therefore the old bogus
entry was used by hal-storage. This was leading to the following:
  * eject/unmount was bailing with errors on my account. The disk was still
    unmounted, but with an error saying that "directoy cannot be removed".
    Of course, it was trying to remove the wrong directory.

    The weird part is that the *wrong* line was used by unmount/eject, but the
    right one was removed from the mtab, thus not fixing the problem.

    Eject was failing since unmount failed as well.
 
  * other users were rejected because HAL considered that they were trying to
    unmount a disk from another user.

What I don't know is wether it is safe to clean /media/.hal-mtab on startup, or
if HAL should do the validation itself. Since hal-mtab is a hal-generated mount
point list, I guess starting with an empty one is safe.

-- System Information:
Debian Release: squeeze/sid
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (500, 'unstable'), (500, 'testing'), (500, 'stable'), (400, 'experimental')
Architecture: i386 (i686)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.27.4 (SMP w/1 CPU core)
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash

Versions of packages hal depends on:
ii  adduser                     3.110        add and remove users and groups
ii  dbus                        1.2.12-1     simple interprocess messaging syst
ii  hal-info                    20090202-1   Hardware Abstraction Layer - fdi f
ii  libc6                       2.9-4        GNU C Library: Shared libraries
ii  libdbus-1-3                 1.2.12-1     simple interprocess messaging syst
ii  libdbus-glib-1-2            0.80-3       simple interprocess messaging syst
ii  libexpat1                   2.0.1-4      XML parsing C library - runtime li
ii  libgcc1                     1:4.3.3-5    GCC support library
ii  libglib2.0-0                2.18.4-2     The GLib library of C routines
ii  libhal-storage1             0.5.11-8     Hardware Abstraction Layer - share
ii  libhal1                     0.5.11-8     Hardware Abstraction Layer - share
ii  libsmbios2                  2.0.3.dfsg-1 Provide access to (SM)BIOS informa
ii  libstdc++6                  4.3.3-5      The GNU Standard C++ Library v3
ii  libusb-0.1-4                2:0.1.12-13  userspace USB programming library
ii  libvolume-id0               0.125-7      libvolume_id shared library
ii  lsb-base                    3.2-20       Linux Standard Base 3.2 init scrip
ii  mount                       2.13.1.1-1   Tools for mounting and manipulatin
ii  pciutils                    1:3.1.2-1    Linux PCI Utilities
ii  pm-utils                    1.2.4-2      utilities and scripts for power ma
ii  udev                        0.125-7      /dev/ and hotplug management daemo
ii  usbutils                    0.73-10      Linux USB utilities

Versions of packages hal recommends:
ii  eject           2.1.5+deb1+cvs20081104-5 ejects CDs and operates CD-Changer
pn  libsmbios-bin   <none>                   (no description available)

Versions of packages hal suggests:
pn  gnome-device-manager          <none>     (no description available)

-- no debconf information