Re: magicdev and non-CD devices

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

On Mon, 2003-05-12 at 00:11, Ryan Warner wrote:
> After much searching I find that magicdev is the
> little beast that automounts my CDs and puts icons on
> my desktop.  Due to the absence of documentation it is
> difficult to discover if this tool is configurable, or
> extendable or what not.  But, the verdict appears to
> be it works for CDs (and DVDs) only.
> 
> While on the newsgroups this tool appears to give a
> certain group of people heartburn, I personally like
> it.  Although it's implementation leaves a lot to be
> desired.  Ignoring the implementation side of things
> though...
> 
> Can/could magicdev be used to mount and display icons
> for other devices like my zip drive or compact flash? 
> In other words, any removable media.

> The current state doesn't seem ideal, but any ideas on
> accomplishing cleanly accomplishing this today.
> (magicdev or otherwise)

I think other people have answered the basic questions
about how it should work in the future; d-bus should
be used to notify logged in users on hotplug events.

But a few quick notes:
 
 - Actually, displaying icons on the desktop has nothing
   to do with magicdev. That's handled within nautilus.
   On Red Hat Linux, it should actually be possible to
   get USB/Compact flash working with only nautilus changes;
   we had it working with MC for a release or two before
   switched over to magicdev.

 - The problems that give people heartburn with magicdev
   really don't have much to do with magicdev; people
   would have the same problems with *any* program that
   checks for CD insertion. About the only thing that 
   could be done to improve the situation is to keep a list
   of broken drives to blacklist.

Regards,
					Owen