I was going to let this go but decided to make one more reply.
I agree with Markus. What I think you don’t realize is that what you are asking for is exactly this. The only way to make this easier is to automate the disk handling. And that is something that is very challenging and requires way more effort than I think you realize to achieve and do so in a way that covers the vast range of Linux platforms that OH can run on, completely ignoring all the other platforms that are officially supported.
And we really are not asking anything more for those who want to use Linux. The user does have to know something.
OK. We are running on a headless machine (i.e. no display, keyboard, or mouse attached). Exactly how is this system supposed to prompt you for what to do with it? If you are running a Desktop Linux with a GUI then yes, indeed, when you plug in an external drive it pops up a dialog to ask what to do with it. But we don’t have that.
And this was a decision made purposfully. The windowing environment requires massive amounts of resources. Running a remote desktop server like VNC requires event more. The amount of resources required to support this GUI environment would make it such that openHABian can only work on the most powerful SBCs, if that, or full up computers. Seems like a pretty high price to pay to make it so the user can get a nice little popup in those rare cases where a new USB drive is plugged in.
I’m sure it can be made better. But the point we are trying to get across is it’s not our job to fix Linux. Given there is no way to get that nice little pop-up on a headless command line only server our choices are:
- write something that only supports a very limited combination of file systems and devices and completely automate it
- turn openHABian into a software appliance
- continue to require the user to know a little bit about Linux to maintain the system
1 will require a lot of work and leave us with a vastly reduced set of options that can be supported. To support everything will require us to fix Linux.
2 will require an unbelievable amount of work, probably more work than OH itself. And all this work would probably take effort away from areas which are a high priority IMHO like adding the ability to add tags to Items in PaperUI and other OH specific usability improvements.
3 is what we are left with.
First you say
My intention and suggestions was not to automate disk handling.
Then you say the above. So at least at some level you agree, we are talking about automated disk handling.
It is a solution. It is just a solution you don’t like.
The problem is to make openHABian better in this way requires us to either make severe limitiations to what is supported or make fundamental changes to how Linux works. Neigther are acceptable.
Just to provide a little bit about the scale of the problem, on Windows there are maybe four file system types supported: CIFS (i.e. SAMBA), NFS, FAT16, FAT32. Mac has a similar number of supported file systems (note there is not much overlap which is why it is so hard to use a Mac formatted drive in a Windows Machine).
Linux supports 15-20.
And that is just dealing with the file systems. Then we have fundamental problems caused by the different ways network file systems and physical devices work which often boil down to permission problems.
OK, lets go down this path for a bit.
This problem is WAY bigger than backup. If you really want to be able to install and maintain an OH system without being a Linux enthusiast which, fankly, in this context means no Linux knowledge at all then we need to build a software appliance.
What is a software appliance? If you have ever used something like pfSense, DD-WRT, Tomato, OpenMediaVault, openELEC and a number of other systems out there. A software appliance comes as a full OS image and a very robust web based or GUI based user interface that allows the installation and configuration of everything that is allowed on that platform.
So what would that look like for openHAB? It would mean throwing out pretty much everything that has been done in openHABian and starting from scratch. Then we would need to built a robust web application that can:
- configure everything necessary in the OS
- install and uninstall software
- configure said software through a web based UI which means WE have to write these UIs for all the third party applications that OH can work with (which ranges in the dozens)
- secure the web based UI
Once we have that then we can use an approach like pfSense uses and compile and return a big XML file containing the backup of everything or add some sort of UI that allows you to find and mount a plugged in external drive to back up to or something like that.
And even once this is done, there will be tons and tons of features that many users of OH depend on that won’t be supported or won’t be supported in the same ways. And the long therm effort required to keep up with all the UIs and plug-ins and such necessary to allow us to continue to use the latest versions of all the third party programs is huge.
Even if everyone dropped what they were doing now and only worked on this I think it would be a couple of years before we say anything even remotely useful. Look at PaperUI. It has been two years (I think)
And this is just to get us up to something minimally useful. I’m not sure we would ever get to the same capabilities.
It’s an open source project. If a group of developers want to take this sort of thing on they are free to do so. It would be welcomed by the community.