docs/106148: [PATCH] extend the documentation for handling USB drives

[Marc Fonvieille]

On Fri, Dec 01, 2006 at 07:15:53PM +0100, Roland Smith wrote:
> 
> >Description:
> The disks chapter of the handbook is quite short in its description of the
> handling of USB mass-storage drives. The included patch is an attempt to
> expand/clarify this for new users.
> 
> 	
> >How-To-Repeat:
> N/A
> >Fix:
> This patch has been tested to apply cleanly on revision 1.265 and 1.267.
> 
> ------- patch for en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/disks/chapter.sgml -------
> --- chapter.sgml.orig	Sun Oct  8 17:01:02 2006
> +++ chapter.sgml	Sun Oct  8 17:48:40 2006
> @@ -777,6 +777,68 @@
>        <para>to your configuration file for USB 2.0 support.  Note
>  	&man.uhci.4; and &man.ohci.4; drivers are still needed if you
>  	want USB 1.X support.</para>
> +
> +      <para>To make these devices mountable as a normal user, certain steps
> +	have to be taken. First, the devices that are created when a USB
> +	storage device is connected need to be accessible. A solution is to
> +	create a group (e.g. named usb) that users of these devices need to
> +	belong to. This is done with &man.pw.8;. The users in question also
> +	need to be added to that group. This is also done with
> +	&man.pw.8;. Second, when the devices are created, they have to be
> +	accessible by this group. This is accomplished by adding a line for
> +	these devices to &man.devfs.rules.5;;
> +      </para>
> +
> +      <programlisting>add path 'da*' mode 0660 group usb</programlisting>
> +
> +      <note>
> +	<para>If you already have SCSI disks in your system, you want to
> +	  do this a bit different. E.g., if you already have
> +	  disks <filename>da0</filename> through <filename>da2</filename>
> +	  attached to the system, change the line as follows:
> +	</para>
> +
> +	<programlisting>add path 'da[3-9]*' mode 0660 group usb</programlisting>
> +
> +	<para>This will exclude the already existing disks from the usb
> +	  group.
> +	</para>

[...]

Your idea is a great improvement to the current section, but I think it
would be better to use the same scheme as the one used by the FreeBSD
GNOME team for HAL, i.e, using operator group as in
http://www.freebsd.org/gnome/docs/faq2.html#q19
This would keep a consistency between our docs and would be compatible
with GNOME and other things using HAL.

-- 
Marc