[gentoo-user] Autofs or ivman?

[Stroller]

Hi there,

I was on #gentoo yesterday asking about autofs & someone recommended  
ivman instead.
Which does gentoo-users think I should use?

My principal interest is in NFS mounting /usr/portage on my PS3 & an  
old laptop, as neither has a lot of disk-space - I have an always-on  
server that can export the directory - but also in mounting a bunch  
of /media/video/[0..9]/ directories.

I guess I'm likely to use CD / DVD in the near future & USB / CF  
flash memory at some point in the future - I can imagine it being  
desirable to have the system mount one device as /mnt/external- 
harddrive and another at /media/photos (determined by device / vendor  
ID?) but I'm not sure if this is the job of the automounter or udev?

Reading the autofs howto [1], it bothers me that common practice is  
to have a bunch of /mnt/auto/foo, /mnt/auto/bar, directories  
symlinked into the places they're REALLY supposed to go. Another  
guide makes a /var/autofs/ tree of directories, but whatever - why do  
I have to have this extra clutter of all these extra symlinks?!?! I  
just want the network filesystem to be mounted in some sensible  
place, just as if I'd typed `mount server:/usr/portage /usr/portage`.  
I appreciate there's probably a good reason for the way autofs works,  
bit it does make ivman look more interesting.

My concern with ivman is that googling it doesn't turn up a bunch of  
beginners' guides the way googling autofs does. The ivman howto [3]  
discusses incompatibility problems with different versions, and  
indicates that the /etc/init.d/script isn't provided by the ebuild,  
but must be managed outside of portage. I don't have a problem with  
that, per-se, but it suggests to me that ivman isn't so well  
supported, a suggestion which seems to be supported by ivman's  
sourceforge page [4] which was last updated February last year and  
which says "Ivman is currently developed by ?????"

So it's a bit of a dilemma for me. Because of my compulsive nature,  
autofs' clutter of symlinks really bothers me, and ivman's  
ConfigActions look really powerful - it looks like you can have it  
automatically exec a command when a specific device is plugged in,  
for instance.

But I want to set this up once & forget it - I really don't want to  
be learning & configuring now a package which will be unsupported in  
the future.

Thanks in advance for any comments,

Stroller.




[1] http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Auto_mount_filesystems_(AUTOFS)
[2] http://www.greenfly.org/tips/autofs.html
[3] http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_ivman
[4] http://ivman.sourceforge.net/
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