VeraCrypt support in GNOME

[segfault <segfault riseup net>]

Hi,

first a quick status update: the project to add VeraCrypt support to
GNOME made good progress in the last months. Our work on Disks, glib,
GVfs, and partly GTK+, was merged already:

  https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-disk-utility/issues/84
  https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/glib/merge_requests/120
  https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gvfs/merge_requests/4/
  https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/merge_requests/260

The remaining important merge requests are:

  https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/merge_requests/126
  https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/merge_requests/200
  https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/merge_requests/244

We hope that these can be merged in time for the GTK+ 3.24 / GNOME Shell
3.30 releases. Given the feature freeze will happen soon, time is pressing.

Our main concern is the GNOME Shell merge request
(https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/merge_requests/126), which
seems to be stalled, possibly due to holiday or higher priority work,
which is why we're hereby reaching out to the broader GNOME development
community, in the hope that someone has time to look into it :)

We are also concerned about the merge request for including interesting
device mapper devices and loop devices in the GTK places sidebar
(https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/merge_requests/200), which was
rejected. The purpose of this merge request is to include encrypted file
containers in the sidebar. Based on our user survey, file containers are
very common among VeraCrypt users (used by 76% of Tails+VeraCrypt users):

  https://tails.boum.org/blueprint/veracrypt/#survey

We did not get an explanation for the rejection, except that there
should be no special-casing of these devices in GTK+. So a couple weeks
ago, we asked for a clarification and we explained that we don't think
that this would qualify as special-casing, given these volumes are
already listed by the GVfs volume monitor:

  https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/merge_requests/200#note_261361

The volume monitor documentation explicitly states that it lists devices
and volumes interesting for the user, i.e. "what a file selector or file
manager would show in a sidebar". In our tests, the only volumes that
were added to the sidebar by our patches were encrypted volumes
(excluding those on internal drives).

We would appreciate  to get a comment on this, because we see this as an
essential feature for the usability of the VeraCrypt support in GNOME.
Thanks a lot in advance!

Cheers