Bashing my head against mount again...

[Rob Landley]

Ok, threw the mount.c I've been working on into a backup file and started over 
from a fresh copy of that's in svn.  Let's try this again.

I need to get -a to work right, and since I started trying to fix it other 
people have noticed the problems (see bugs 281, 534, 606, and 607).

The fundamental problem is mount has to maintain more than one set of flags 
for -a to have a chance.  The information entered from the command line 
(flags, fstype, overrides like -r) needs to be merged with the corresponding 
information read from fstab, but in the -a case the command line data needs 
to be re-applied separately to each set of fstab information.  And that means 
there has to be two copies of everything.  Possibly I should collect all that 
crap together into a structure for clarity, if that won't bloat the code too 
badly.

A second problem is that this area of the code is complicated by the gotos.  
Unfortunately, I can't move singlemount() out into a separate function and 
still expect the compiler to sanely optimize away everything I've got it 
optimizing away, such as the stuff useMtab is a guard for.  It turns out that 
gcc can't do constant propogation between functions or through global (even 
static) variables.  Maybe with unit-at-a-time it would do that right, but I 
can't rely on that yet.  Possibly I can add extra ENABLE guards to get the 
correct result; I've been tinkering for a while.  But one of the bug entries 
wanted to know why everything was such a big mess of gotos?  Humoring the 
optimizer to produce small code.

A related issue is that -o remount doesn't work right.  For remount, we need 
to read from mtab instead of fstab, and for the single mount case we need to 
take the _last_ hit instead of the first.  (What happens when multiple 
filesystems are overmounted on the same mount point and you remount one of 
the overmounted ones?  I have no idea; if I had more time I'd fiddle with it 
to find out, but right now I just want to make the darn thing work).

You may have noticed mount -a is a little harder than average to test 
thoroughly on one's laptop...

I _could_ just patch the bugs people  have noticed and call it a night, but 
that doesn't fix the actual _problem_.  Grrr...

Rob
-- 
Steve Ballmer: Innovation!  Inigo Montoya: You keep using that word.
I do not think it means what you think it means.