NFS_mount_popup
Please check the status of this specification in Launchpad before editing it. If it is Approved, contact the Assignee or another knowledgeable person before making changes.
Launchpad entry: none yet
Packages affected: nfs-common, ...?
Summary
While a newly installed Ubuntu desktop is able to for example do
mount 10.1.2.3:/home /home -t nfs -o rw,defaults,nfsvers=3
it will perform very slow and even fail (timeout) if the nfs-common package is not installed. This spec suggests to wrap mount ...-t nfs... to send a notification to dbus(?) so that a popup can be present to the user to install nfs-common in case this is not already done.
Rationale
Use cases
- Bring laptop to work and mount the NFS servers there
- Setup an NFS network at home
Scope
Increase usability for laptop users and people unexperienced with NFS
Design
I suggest that the mount command is wrapped to aviod affecting upstream too much since dbus is a new and possibly a slightly Ubuntu specific concept. The wrapper could catch other file system specific actions that would benefit from installing additional packages. The user should be able to make a setting to accept or ignore these suggestions automtically. The dbus event should be catched by a deamon responsible for handling the (lightbulb?) popup and trigger the package installer if the user so chooses.
Implementation
The wrapper could be implemented as a shell scrip or there could be a conditional compile of mount sending dbus events.
The damon is either already existing for similar purposes or written similarily to the Ubuntu update checker.
Code
Data preservation and migration
When this wrapper is installed the original mount is renamed to mount-debian or similar and the wrapper installs as /bin/mount. This way all functionality is still preserved and the migration is transparent.
Unresolved issues