Re: On format of media in Nautilus

[Emmanuele Bassi <ebassi gmail com>]

hi John;

On Fri, 2007-02-02 at 01:53 +1300, John Stowers wrote:
> > I take a quick look at Gparted, I find there is a format menu, so seems
> > this tool support format, also I find in Suse 10, there is a tool named
> > partitionar, which also have functionality to format, seems we can use
> > them to format...(I have not look into them at them moment).
> 
> Gparted uses libparted underneath. Because formatting is a small
> subset of Gparted features perhaps it is better to use libparted to
> format the device directly, in this case?

libparted is not hard to use inside an application; and provided that
does what an all-purpose formatter requires, I'd be willing to let
gnome-utils depend (softly, possibly) on it - and ask the release-team
to add an external dependency.  as I said in the previous email, though,
I don't know if libparted requires special privileges to format a device
- it might well do, and this would mean adding a way to escalate the
user's permissions via some other mechanism like gksu or gksudo.  that's
why adding a FormatDevice method to HAL would solve us some issues: we
might delegate the HAL all the low-level, and high-privilege interaction
with the device, and avoid having to deal with it ourselves.

+++

at the moment, anyway, I'm spread pretty thin on gnome-utils
maintainership duties, with barely enough time to work on the new
features for the dictionary and the screenshot utilities (luckily, both
baobab and the search tool have maintainers of their own); it seems that
a couple of developers are interested in making gfloppy work as an
all-purpose formatter, so let's wait and see what happens.

ciao,
 Emmanuele.

-- 
Emmanuele Bassi,  E: ebassi gmail com
W: http://www.emmanuelebassi.net
B: http://log.emmanuelebassi.net