Re: magicdev [was Re: Gnome-vfs blocks cddb-capplet. Why?]

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

Dick Porter <dick ximian com> writes:

> > Magicdev _never_ locked the device itself. A very early version
> > of magicdev explicitely unlocked the device, but that was a bad
> > idea and removed.
> 
> If magicdev automatically mounts the cd then it will cause the drive door
> to be locked.  That is the point about automatic mounts having to go
> hand-in-hand with automatic unmounts (which you snipped from the reply).
> 
> The irritation factor is high when I insert a cd, think "whoops, wrong one"
> and the &£$*ing eject button doesnt eject.

Automatic unmounts are not really possible with current PC hardware, as
far as I've been told. The spec for IDE/SCSI CDROM drives does include
the capability for the eject button to do notification to the OS, but
apparently that's not really implemented.

My opinion would be that:

 - If you were planning to accss the CD-ROM through the command line,
   unmount /mnt/cdrom is just a few keystrokes away.
     
 - If you were planning to access the CD-ROM through the file manager,
   right-click/unmount is just a few clicks a way.

So, it's not really an issue of "hunting through the menus".

Alan has some sort of userspace NFS daemon that he claims is the right
solution here, so you can switch CD's without having to unmount
and mount them, and it just looks like the file system is changing
or disappearing.

Seems like a poor subsititute for the real thing; but...

> > > In fact, magicdev was one of the reasons that finally pushed me into
> > > switching to Debian for all my machines; for someone that starting using
> > > Red Hat with the "Mother's Day" release, that was a pretty drastic change.
> > 
> > Well, you _could_ have just turned it off with one check box in the
> > control center, but hey, I guess it's less fun than switching to
> > Debian.
> 
> It wasn't the only reason.  And as I didnt find the option to turn it off,
> maybe the fault is shared with the UI :) .

I think the problem is that experienced Unix people simply don't make
the leap from "problem with my CD-ROM drive" to "there is a preference
in the control center", and the old control center was a bit hard
to find *anything* in.

I can't think of a more obvious location for the preference than:

 Peripherals / CD Properties [ with a CD-ROM icon next to it ]

Regards,
                                        Owen