The grand plan with gnome-mount is to get the appropriate GNOME
software (such as gnome-volume-manager and gnome-vfs) to use this
instead of invoking mount(1)/umount(1)/eject(1) / invoking methods on
HAL directly.

Included in gnome-mount is also gnome-umount and gnome-eject. All
programs utilize the methods on HAL and as such run unprivileged. The
rationale for gnome-mount is to have a centralized place (in gconf)
where settings (e.g. mount options, mount location) are
maintained.