Re: Floppy disk access in Gnome.

[Sean Middleditch <elanthis awesomeplay com>]

Erg, at least you are admitting it's a kernel issue.  ~,^

That is were it ends.  What do you expect GNOME to do?  We can automount
already, there are automounter projects currently available.  Make a GTK
configuration program for them if you think it will help.

If you tie it to GNOME, then only GNOME apps will use it, not
KDE/GTk/console/X/whatever apps; just GNOME ones.  That would be pretty
damn stupid.

Even if you go with current automounters, one of the original issues
brought up in this thread was when users just pull out disks.  Those
will still get clobbered or whatnot, by the kenel, unless you constantly
scan a mounted volume to see if it is still there, which would be damned
ugly.  Perhaps a powerful automounting/autoumounting daemon could be
conceived to handle even umounting, and mount CD's so they can still be
ejected, and not fsck up audio CD's by scanning, etc.  And if it
umounted after every usage, well... that might work, but would be dog
slow.  Go ahead and write a floppy: accessor for gnome-vfs, tho, if you
can write one that works fairly well, I'll certainly use it recommend it
to people.  It would never be as robust as a system daemon or kernel
level solution, tho.

As for an automoutning daemon, a configuration druid/dialog in GNOME is
one thing, if such a magickal powerhouse automounting system was indeed
created (which would be done by people working on the project, not
whining on the GNOME list) then GNOME should definitely have a
configuration dialog for it (if one is needed; I imagine a system may
well just need some fstab entries and a daemon launched at start up; but
perhaps autorun and whatnot could be added, who knows).  But that's all
that belongs in GNOME.  People want a print control system in GNOME. 
That is good.  They want print setup programs/dialogs.  That's great. 
Writing our own damned printing daemon and print filters is ludicrous. 
There is no difference with removable media mounting (or network
mounting, for that matter).

I know it's now well understood it's a kernel issue.  Next it must be
understood that it is *not* a GNOME issue.  It is a kernel issue, and
possibly a system-level daemon issue.  That's where it belongs. 
Otherwise, we might as well write our own network filesystem server,
print daemon, file system, networking protocol, VM manager, etc.

Then I can tell all my friends I use GNOME OS.  (well, my friends don't
give a damn about UNIX, so they'd probably just ignore me about it, but
still).

On Sun, 2001-10-28 at 07:30, George Farris wrote:
> Great Sean we already know it's a kernel issue.
> 
> I acknowledged this and then I asked "What can we do".  The answer of
> "it's a kernel issue" isn't really an answer. it's just acknowledging
> something we already know.
> 
> We have a user interface issue here. If you don't believe that I'm sorry
> but... we still have to deal with the problem.  The average user only
> sees GNOME.
> 
> So are there any suggestions?  Has anybody talked to kernel people about
> this.  And yes Sean supermount works but it's buggy and people can't
> even find the latest patches.
> 
> We just can't turn our heads and believe this will go away.  By at least
> writing this email it's a start.
> 
> Do you have any constructive suggestions.
> 
> Maybe something in the gnome file system layer that when a person tries
> to save a file in /mnt/floppy it traps that request and says"  I'm about
> to mount the floppy disk, please insert a diskette" and then
> automatically un-mounts it after the write.
> 
> Is this difficult?  It would at least address some part of the issue.
> 
> 
> 
> On Sun, 2001-10-28 at 09:33, Sean Middleditch wrote:
> 
> -- 
> George Farris - VE7FRG
> George gmsys com
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