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Comment by amlib | Hacker News Reader

This shouldn't happen with external disks formatted with ntfs, ext or udf. If you have an EXT4 or something like that external disk things get more hazy...

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Whether it should or shouldn't, it did. But I think the issue is less that it happened, and more that the user interface doesn't respond to the "no permission" error by offering up a button you can click to attempt to grant yourself permission. If it can be done through the terminal, there should be a novice friendly way as well.

(For that matter, a novice user shouldn't even have to know how their external hard drive is formatted! It might not even be their drive; it could be a family member attempting to share photos with them. If they're just plugging it in for the first time and seeing errors, they'd be pretty hesitant to mess around with the terminal typing in commands they don't understand).

Sorry, I didn't mean to imply this isn't an important problem that needs to be addressed. I mostly agree with what you say and I bet the right way to deal with this is to have it be mounted with a special user space filesystem like fuse that wraps the permissions to always look correct for the user that mounted it, but I guess no one so far has decided to take upon such task...

Can't it just do what I _mean_ if it's a Desktop install and mount it like ntfs, udf, or etc?

no? A file system is the format that the data on the disk is stored as. If you mount an ext4 disk as ntfs, it wouldn't load properly. It's not just the interface for loading the data, it's how the data is actually stored.

What I mean is that it should ignore permissions on external ext4 by default in Desktops.

There's no concept of "external". What would it be, "USB" or anything mounted under /mnt or /media? What if it's the root OS drive of another computer you're trying to fix connected through a USB-SATA adapter? Should any program running with minimized privileges get to overwrite even root files in that OS drive?

I think that it's a pretty good heuristic that if permissions exist in the filesystem, they matter and shouldn't be ignored.

They shouldn't be ignored. but they can be ignored, is the problem. File permissions are not encryption or security: If I can't read a file on this machine, because I'm not root, I'll just move the drive to a different machine where I am root.

But I agree with you, they do have a use and to some use cases matter, and we shouldn't arbitrarily decide to ignore them.

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