Re: Volume handling proposal

[Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On Thu, 2003-09-18 at 10:21, Tuomas Kuosmanen wrote:
> On Tue, 2003-09-16 at 16:40, Alexander Larsson wrote:
> > I'm not sure what roots we want in the fileselector. At the minimum we
> > want the desktop ones, but do we want e.g. unmounted floppies/CDs there?
> 
> We probably do. The whole idea of "mounting" stuff makes sense for big
> multiuser unix servers (university environments etc) where you mount a
> big share and a lot of users will use it for their data.

Well. Its more of a technical problem that we have a hard time getting
around. We can't see the floppy data until its been mounted, and we
can't mount automatically as soon as there is a floppy in the drive, so
we have to do it "manually".

> For a personal desktop machine, mounting network shares is a good idea,
> but the whole "mount/umount" concept is kind of strange and weird for
> floppies and CD-Roms (and while floppies are kind of a dying media for
> many of us, a lot of places like ad-agencies <-> printhouses still use
> Zip disks to transfer and store files, which conceptually are just big
> floppies)
> 
> So for CD's, floppies and such, it might be a good idea to hide the
> whole "mount" thing and just give them access to the stuff, and somehow
> let them eject the stuff after the use. Unlike Mac floppy drives PC
> floppies and probably zip disks can be ejected physically which probably
> needs to be taken into account - users do that, once they copied the
> file, *pop* goes the disk from the drive.

I guess we could do this using floppy:, that way we don't have to mount
the floppy and have it go weird when the user yanks the floppy. I'm not
sure how well that would work for a ZIP though.


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 Alexander Larsson                                            Red Hat, Inc 
                   alexl redhat com    alla lysator liu se 
He's an uncontrollable Catholic gangster gone bad. She's a mentally unstable 
mutant college professor with the power to see death. They fight crime!