Comment 21 for bug 14335

One problem of using vfat devices on linux has always been that all files are executable by default, to accomodate the tiny use case of having shell scripts, and Windows exe files executable (through wine or CLI). However, this is a rather huge pain for all other files, since nautilus will keep asking you about whether to open or execute the file, even if it's just a .txt or .mp3.

We recently discovered that the vfat fs actually provides a nice kludge for this:

http://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/filesystems/vfat.txt (search for "showexec")

So with the showexec mount option we have sensible permissions for data files, while retaining the x bit for .exe, .com, and .bat, thus emulating windows' behaviour very closely.

I just committed a test case which tests sensible dir and file permissions for all but the known-broken ntfs and vfat:

http://cgit.freedesktop.org/udisks/commit/?id=a7effbab11fb5a5d81b810a1cb3b29864bfde575

My proposal is to add the "showexec" mount option by default (or at least to "allowed") for vfat. The proposed patch removes "vfat" from the list of known-broken file systems, the test case now passes for vfat.