I use a multitude of external drives, most of them with more than one partition. Many of these drives are frequently re-partitioned and re-formatted for different uses.
Typically, when I connect such a drive, I am only interested in one of the partitions, but the Mac’s OSX tries to mount all partitions it can make sense of. I can, of course, then unmount the partitions I do not want mounted, but I would rather positively choose the partition(s) I want mounted, and that the system leaves alone all other partitions. Apart from convenience, avoiding automount should also keep the unmounted file systems unchanged (for example keep the SHA fingerprint intact) and reduce the risk of data loss by mistake.
I know that I can disable automount for individual UUIDs (see e.g. How to Disable USB Auto-mount). But since I connect a lot of external drives and their UUIDs change, I would prefer not to call vifs after each media repartition and initialisation and eventually clutter /etc/fstab with lots of noauto entries most of which are obsolete after a while.
So I am looking for a system option to disable automount upon connect alltogether once and for all storage media without a need to individually disable. I would then use finder or diskutil to mount just the file system instances I choose in the particular situation.
(Just to mention, the obvious exception to my “no-automount” policy should be the Mac’s startup disk, which is needed for the system to function.)