Re: Floppy disk access in Gnome.

[Sean Middleditch <elanthis awesomeplay com>]

On Thu, 2001-10-25 at 15:27, Rob Brown-Bayliss wrote:
> On Thu, 2001-10-25 at 16:42, Sander Vesik wrote:
> 
> > Have you considered that this is gnome, not linux kernel or automountr
> > project?
> 
> It is a gnome issue, not a linux issue.  Linux users useing linux as a
> server are not going to have a problem with mounting disks etc, but
> grannys and other average non-geeks are not going to understand it.
> 

For the love of the gods, no!  It *is* a kernel issue!  Even if you
autofs it, you can't automagically umount properly; no matter how nice
of a system for moutning/umount GNOME has, the underlying kernel, in
it's current architecture, can't handle it.  Period.  There will be sync
problems, at least, not to mention various kernel issues with remounting
drives.  If you pull a floppy, then insert a new one, GNOME could
remount; but when the kernel umounted, it *might* try to sync and fsck
up the current floppy.  Any system that automatically handles
mount/umount suffers from that, but the extent can be minimized by sync
periods and floppy detection (if a floppy isn't there anymore, throw out
the disk buffer, etc.).

This *is* a kernel issue.  It's simple.  End of story.  When you add
supermount or comparable technology to the kernel, then it will just
work, and won't even need a modification to GNOME (although you might
want to remove the option to umount supermount volumes from Nautilus,
because that would make them stop working properly if a newbie did so).

Use supermount.  Go ahead and install Mandrake if you want it right now,
or download the patches and make your own.  You will have a (slight)
drop in stability, but it wouldn't make the OS any worse than other OS's
that handle automounting/umounting.

If you want to try to use an automounter, then they're already there! 
You don't need to do anything to GNOME.  Set down the sync rate on your
disk (so that filesystem changes are done damn near immediately) and set
up automount for your floppy/CD-ROM.  Umounting might need some new code
(I've never tried automounters before) that would require scanning of
drive every so often (very short intervals, so keep integrity, which
would be a serious performance hit, depending on the media, and on CD's
and such could cause problems on audio CD's if not handled properly). 
Again, though, that software exists outside of GNOME.  There are even
kernel based modules for it on Linux, and likely other OS's.

> Just as I had a problem when I switched to windows with it's not knowing
> if there was a floppy in the drive (The amiga knew, great that was)
> 

Hmm, I'm curious as to what you mean; how does Windows not knowing there
is a floppy work?  Doesn't it always check every time you access it?

> I guess gnome needs to adopt an automount system rather than leaving it
> up to the distros.  
> 

No no no.  As I've said, that will just make GNOME an unstable desktop,
compared to one that lets the kernel handle it.  Besides, an automounter
may not be system independent, which could cause serious problems if
depended on.  Your mention of "distros" shows that again nothing but
Linux is considered.

> 
> -- 
> 
>   Rob Brown-Bayliss
>  ---======o======---
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Sean Etc.