Re: Volume handling proposal

[Tuomas Kuosmanen <tigert ximian com>]

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.

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.

As for the file selector, I think it is pretty common to File->Open,
then pop in the disk on the floppy/CD/Zip drive and select the drive
from the pulldown - at least in Windows. So it might be a good idea to
have a "Volumes" selector in file dialog, which shows you the toplevel
"user root" that you proposed.

In general I like your idea. And now I replied before reading the whole
thread so I guess I made a complete idiot of myself by stating the same
things than everyone else.. :-] Or who knows..? 

Tuomas


--
Tuomas Kuosmanen :: Art Director, Ximian :: <tigert ximian com>