>I've seen that the "pmount" utility is used in TDE R14 for 
>removable 
>devices.
>I've also seen that this utility is NOT provided at all in some 
>distributions, e.g. Mageia 3.
>
>Questions:
>1) If pmount does not exist, is there any alternative in TDE R14 
>to 
>mount/umount devices ? (I'd say no, because I have an error 
>message 
>saying pmount was not found)
>2) This utility looks like it is not maintained anymore upstream. 
>I've 
>built 0.9.99-alpha, and it works but needs some patches. Could we 
>import 
>into our Git to have our own "TDE-certified" pmount utility ?
>3) Could'nt udisks2 do the same as pmount ?
>
>And some more questions about R14 new features ...
>1) Is HAL/Halbackend code still entirely present ? (for old distro 
>NOT 
>having udisks, upower, etc ... but having HAL out of the box)
>2) Do we have a summary of "what libraries are used for" in 
>tdelibs/tdebase ? For example, if I build with "udisks" but no 
>"udisks2" 
>support, what feature will I lose exactly ? And what alternatives 
>do I 
>have ?
>
>Up to 3.5.13.x, the situation seemed clear: without HAL, there was 
>no 
>alternative :-)

Many months ago when I started testing tdehwlibs with Tim, I too 
noticed the pmount requirement. The package is not part of the 
stock Slackware but easily compiled and installed in Slackware. 
Nonetheless, that pmount is not a standard package in many distros 
does raise the question of how to best handle that discrepancy. If 
pmount is no longer maintained upstream, and if pmount is the only 
palatable method for supporting tdehwlib, then perhaps we ought to 
slip pmount into our dependencies tree. We have libart_gpl as a 
precendent for such a move.

I'm using pmount 0.93, which is the current stable version.

If there are alternatives to pmount, that nonetheless means 
extensive rewrites and testing. We already have enough on our plate 
to get R14.0.0 out the door in a timely fashion, and progress 
toward that has somewhat stalled of late. Replacing pmount also 
likely means an ABI change and according to our new versioning 
scheme, would mean such changes should wait until R14.1.0 (and not 
R14.0.1, which would be a bug-fix and maintenance release).

As Alexander noted in another response, Trinity can be compiled 
with HAL or TDEHWLIB support, but not both. For a couple of months 
I built both ways as Slackware 13.1 uses HAL and 14.0 uses the 
udisks framework. I'm no longer using 13.1 and can't say how well 
we've maintained HAL support. I now only use 14.0 and I am not 
experiencing any serious problems with tdehwlib.

Darrell