Re: Volume handling proposal

[Sean Middleditch <elanthis awesomeplay com>]

On Wed, 2003-09-17 at 16:40, Rob Adams wrote:
> On Wed, 2003-09-17 at 13:02, Sean Middleditch wrote:
> > In a similar vein, tho, if we have autodetect, can we show the device,
> > but not actually mount it until accessed?  Some kind of gnome-vfs flag
> > or property or something for "this volume is there, but we need to run
> > the user mount commands before we access it"
> 
> Similarly, can we detect when the button on the drive is pressed and
> either unmount and eject the drive if possible, or if not pop up a
> dialog listing applications that have open files on the device?  I think
> that the UNIX way of having to manually unmount is a little
> counterintuitive.  Mac people I guess are a used to it, but having to do
> something in the UI when there's already a button for it on the front of
> the computer seems silly.

As I understand, a lot of hardware simply *can't* do that kind of
notification - the OS simply has to keep the media unlocked (unless a
specific application requests it, i.e., when installing software off the
CD).  This is why Linux kernel hacks like supermount are so popular -
the let the drive stay unlocked whenever possible, and simply return
filesystem errors if apps try to access an open file/directory after
media has been removed.

Higher quality and/or newer removable media devices *should* have the
right kind of notification features.  Whether or not they are
standardized, or supported by Linux/BSD/Solaris/whatever, is another
question.  Even if we were to put a dependency on kernel support for
this, there's still a quite likely possibility of older/crappy hardware
being used.

(Hopefully I remembered all that right.  I had a talk with Miguel about
it some time ago, and that was more or less the gist of it. ;-)

> 
> -Rob
> 
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-- 
Sean Middleditch <elanthis awesomeplay com>
AwesomePlay Productions, Inc.