apt uses hardcoded /cdrom, use hal instead (if it is availabe)

Sadly apt only supports the hard coded cdrom path at the moment.

A hal extension to apt would be nice.

Thinking about this problem it looks like we need something like methods/cdrom-hal (just as Sebastian suggested).

It should transparently fall back to methods/cdrom if no hal is available. If hal is available it should:
a) scan the hal device tree to see what cdroms are available on the system and what is mounted there.
 1. If anything is mounted already use IdentCdrom() to see if it is a disk we want
 2. If nothing is mounted prompt and ask the user to insert a CD, then repeat step 1 (this assumes that hal will auto-mount, if it does not, step one need to mount too)

This is complicated by the fact that we want to avoid having apt depend on hal obviously, so this needs to be a stricly optional feature.

Something like the attached code could be added (need fixup for e.g. the hardcoded cdrom size) and methods/cdrom.cc would try to dlopen() it. If that works, it can use hal_get_mounted_cdroms() and scan those mount-points for a ubuntu cd. Instead of dlopen() we could try to callout to a helper (most likely a shell script that uses hal-find-by-property).

I think any removable media (not CD/DVD disks) could be used as packages repositories.

Or with the shell:

$ hal-find-by-property --key "storage.drive_type" --string "cdrom"
/org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/storage_model_DVDRAM_GSA_4083N

$ hal-find-by-property --key "info.parent" --string "/org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/storage_model_DVDRAM_GSA_4083N"
/org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/volume_label_Ubuntu_7_04_i386

$ hal-get-property --udi "/org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/volume_label_Ubuntu_7_04_i386" --key volume.mount_point
/media/Ubuntu 7.04 i386

Michael, please don't close Baltix distro bugs, assigned to Baltix by main Baltix developer ;)

so i had this problem on how no matter what i do the computer cant mount the cdrom.. on my pc i have a cd rom and a dvd rw drive... so i just unplugged the cd rom drive and now my computer reconize the drive and im playing muusic straight from the audio cd im going to try burning a dvd now will see what happens