Re: Floppy disk access in Gnome.

[Adam Williams <awilliam whitemice org>]

>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.

One would have to use the GNOME VFS and write a "floppy" filesystem.  If
tar files can be made browseable and ftp made to look like a filesystem
then why not a floppy via the library used by mtools?
 
>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

I'd like to point out that this ***DOES*** happen on Windows,  trashed
disks that is.  And windows crashes when it thinks the floppy is there
and the user has yanked it.  Or it get's confused about what floppy is
in the drive after you cycle around a few of them.  After being bitten
by this several times,  and having users bitten by it many times (and
they just don't understand)  I am very ***grateful*** for the
mount/unmount procedure.  The drivemount applet (IMHO) makes this really
easy and visually apparent.

>scan a mounted volume to see if it is still there, which would be damned
>ugly.  Perhaps a powerful automounting/autoumounting daemon could be

So ugly I doubt it would work very well.  If you want truly removable
media I think you have to avoid mounting in the first place and use some
"direct" access, aka mtools.

Besides having to flush I/O operations after every operation (slow) the
problem with an automounter would be that alot of PC hardware doesn't
report when a disk has been changed,  so you'd need to check.  It can
potentially be hard to tell, and it always very slow.