Re: [Nautilus-list] Re: File manager integration with magicdev

[Seth Nickell <snickell stanford edu>]

Mabye what you are looking for is devfs? The current /dev filesystem is
not engineered to have things dynamically created etc as they exist or
don't exist. Having scripts that do this is a major hack and fails to
deal with important classes of devices such as hotpluggable USB,
firewire, pcmcia, etc. The "proper" solution to this (if not the
complete solution, its a step in the right direction) is DevFS and
exists in the 2.4.x kernel series, though it is not enabled by default.
It only lists devices it thinks exists, but moreover they are arranged
in an informative heirarchy.

So for example there is /dev/cdroms/cdrom0 and /dev/discs/disc0 and
/dev/discs/disc1 on my system (and much more of course). In addition
there is an IDE chain directory /dev/ide/host0/bus1/target0/lun0/disc
(and also existant partitions on that disc). The system still could be
improved, but the groundwork is there. Now its just a matter of waiting
until it gets turned on by default in shipping distributions (maybe it
is in RH7.1?) and we could start using it for Linux systems.

-Seth

Andrew Post wrote:
> 
> I haven't looked at these changes to gmc or magicdev, admittedly, but
> both have usually attempted to identify devices by the device name
> aliases, name of mount point, and/or filesystem type. Unfortunately,
> filesystem type only works for CD-ROMS, distros don't agree on device
> name aliases, the device name aliasing system in use by Redhat and
> others is incomplete, and no distro that I know of is capable of
> accurately installing device aliases for every removable device on a
> system. Mandrake 7.2 is the best I've seen so far, and it still created
> a link to /dev/fd0 on my laptop's desktop even though I don't have a
> standard floppy installed. The kernel figured out that I don't have a
> floppy: why didn't the script that created the link listen to it? I had
> two cd-rom drives on my desktop machine for a time. Mandrake and SuSE
> both installed a link for only one of them, even though the kernel
> detected both. Sure, there's an accepted practice of calling a cd-rom
> drive /dev/cdrom. But what if you have 2 of them? Apparently, the
> developers at Mandrake and SuSE didn't know either.
> 
> The kernel knows that hardware is installed, so we should use the
> information it provides. What makes a lot more sense is for nautilus
> and/or an automounter to directly use a device detection library like
> kudzu or libdetect to find removable devices. With these libraries, it
> doesn't matter what the device alias or mount point is named, and we can
> provide useful information to the user about the device, a feature
> that's missing from every Linux file manager (hint, hint...). The kernel
> /proc filesystem contains all of the information we need to dynamically
> configure an ACCURATE list of removable devices. Unfortunately, not a
> single distro actually uses much of it for this purpose.
> 
> No one is reinventing the wheel, Owen, because good removable device
> support for Linux doesn't exist yet. We're not even close.
> 
> Andrew
> 
> --
> Andrew Post, M.D.
> MSIS Student, School of Information Science
> Fellow, Center for Biomedical Informatics
> University of Pittsburgh
> Suite 8084 Forbes Tower
> 200 Lothrop Street
> Pittsburgh, PA 15213-2582
> (412) 647-7275
> 
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