The mount system in Ubuntu is very fragmented at the moment.
First there's the traditional unix system, exclusively utilizing /etc/fstab. This is the only system used at bootup.
Then there's various desktop-specific mount systems (gnome-volume-manager, thunar-volman, whatever kde uses). And then there are various other mount systems such as pmount, whatever hal uses behind the scenes, usbmount, etc. These do not reference /etc/fstab at all.
The upshot of this is that disks are mounted in different places depending on whether they're plugged in during boot or hotplugged later on. Mount location may also vary depending on the user's desktop environment. Hotplugged drives are only mounted if someone is logged in and running the appropriate volume manager. And it is difficult for an administrator to override the default mount location.
It would be ideal if these could be unified into one system, so that:
* When a drive is hotplugged, it is mounted in the same place every time with the same settings, regardless of which (if any) user is logged in or which desktop environment (if any) is in use at the time.
* A drive can be manually mounted and unmounted from the command-line and GUI, and will be mounted at the same place every time, and in a human-readable location. (i.e. not the UUID or device filename, but using the volume label or a location predefined in fstab)
* one command-line program handles mounting. This would obviously require modifying the mount program so that it doesn't only care about fstab.
* a drive is mounted in the same place regardless of whether it's connected to the system at boot time (currently handled by mount/fstab) or hotplugged later (currently handled by various programs).
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