Re: udisks2 [WAS: Re: datetime: Remove datetime D-Bus mechanism]

[David Zeuthen <zeuthen gmail com>]

Hey,

On Sat, Jan 21, 2012 at 1:45 PM, Michael Biebl <mbiebl gmail com> wrote:
> Seing that KDE still uses udisks1, I'm wondering what happens if one
> compiles gdu/gvfs against udisks2 and starts a KDE app within GNOME. I
> assume this will fire up udisks-daemon 1 and so both udisks-daemon 1
> and 2 are running at the same time. Will they step on each others toes
> in this case?

Nope, works perfectly fine, won't step on each others toes (because
both daemons are written to listen to changes done not by themselves
... mostly so the desktop reacts if you e.g. mount something from the
command-line). A big part of this puzzle, btw, involved pushing media
polling into the kernel ... if we didn't have this then both daemons
would be removable devices. Fortunately, none of them do this now.

> What is your plan for Fedora (given that you also have a KDE spin).
> Will you ship both udisks versions in the archive? udisks2 for GNOME
> 3.4 and udisks1 for KDE?

Both udisks1 and udisks2 will be available in the Fedora repos - we're
hoping to only ship udisks2 on the GNOME live cd. I don't know what
the KDE guys are doing, I don't follow KDE closely. I'll probably
retire udisks1 after F17 and then either it dies or someone needing it
will pick it up.

> Do you know of any efforts of getting KDE/Solid ported to udisks2?

Not that I know of, no. But I expect that they will make use of their
abstraction layer thingies.

>>> @David: could you confirm this? And do you have any ETA for a udisks2
>>> tarball?
>>
>> There is one at http://udisks.freedesktop.org/releases/
>
> How feature complete do you consider this 1.90.0 release? What is
> missing compared to udisks1? Are any major disruptive changes still
> planned before a 2.0 release?

It's pretty feature complete as far as what was planned - I don't
foresee any big changes apart from bug-fixing. Still holding the right
to break ABI still, but I'm not planning to.

Btw, one thing that we won't support in udisks2 is the various RAID
and LVM bits ... well, we'll still show the fake block devices, such
as the /dev/vg_x61/lv_* ones here

 http://people.freedesktop.org/~david/gdu2-self-test-failed.png

we'll even show the "nice" names instead of the /dev/dm-N non-sense
names. But we're not going to provide any facilities to manage LVM or
MD-RAID like we tried in the old Palimpsest version. But we'll of
course keep the UI up to date if you use mdadm(8) or one of the LVM
tools from the command-line.

There's also support for a lot of other nice features that we didn't
have with udisks1 such as fstab and crypttab editing, support for
easily setting up loop devices, disk imagine (create/restore) which
IMO are more important. I'll blog about all this next week...

Cheers,
David