Re: PROPOSAL: GNOME Volume Manager for GNOME 2.8

[Sean Middleditch <elanthis awesomeplay com>]

This discussion probably belongs on the utopia-list or
hal freedesktop org, since these are issues with those items and not the
desktop as a whole.

On Tue, 2004-06-08 at 13:54, Rui Miguel Seabra wrote:
> On Mon, 2004-06-07 at 17:30 -0400, Robert Love wrote:
> > I formally propose the addition of GNOME Volume Manager to the GNOME 2.8
> > Desktop Release.
> > 
> > GNOME Volume Manager is a simple state machine that acts as a policy
> > engine on top of HAL.  It includes a control panel applet.  Said policy
> > includes auto-mounting of any hot-plugged removable device, auto-
> > mounting of media such as CD's and DVD's, auto play of {Blank,Data,
> > Audio,Video} CD's, and auto importing of photos from camera.
> 
> Question: I see a lot of talk about auto-mount, but what about unmount?
> 
> FC2 auto-mounts if you click on the proper place on "Computer", but
> users have to explicitly tell to unmount.
> 
> g-v-m should be aware of usb hot-unplugging, cd ejects, floppy ejects
> (this one is tryicky on most drives which have to be actively tested).
> 
> That's one of the biggest complaints I hear :|

This is as always all HAL stuff. If gvm gets a notification that a
device is gone, it takes care of it.  HAL can also theoretically let
applications know when a user _wants_ to unmount a device (perhaps
hitting the eject button on their CD drive) so they can close open
documents and such before the unmounting happens.

FOr things like USB devices and such, a signal is received and
unmounting happens.  Any data in use from the drive is screwed, but
there is absolutely nothing you can possibly do about that.

> 
> Another problem: sync
> 
> usb drives have a tendency to allow unmounting even though not _all_
> data was copied into a flash memory, for instance.
> 
> So you unplug a little too soon, and lots of data get lost.

Best fix here may be to just always set automatic immediate syncing for
devices like floppies and USB pen drives so that the window between
modifying data on the drive and the data being actually written in very
small.  It's been a problem with floppies since pretty much their
inception - if a user is dumb^wfoolish^winept^wunskilled enough to not
realize they have to wait for the data to be synced before pulling it
out, they're screwed.  The only way to fix the actual problem is to make
the hardware lock the device in and require OS approval before
unlocking.  Which of course can't happen with USB media like pen drives.

> 
> Hugs, Rui
> 
> ______________________________________________________________________
> _______________________________________________
> desktop-devel-list mailing list
> desktop-devel-list gnome org
> http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
-- 
Sean Middleditch <elanthis awesomeplay com>
AwesomePlay Productions, Inc.