Re: Floppy disk access in Gnome.

[michaeld senet com au]

Quoting Rob Brown-Bayliss <on_the_net clear net nz>
> 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.
> 
> 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)
> 
> I guess gnome needs to adopt an automount system rather than leaving it
> up to the distros.  

Actually this is a difficult problem due to the PC floppy drive.  Any device 
where you can manually eject media, and the OS has no way of detecting the 
request prior to removal, is going to have trouble with write-later caching.

Mac/Amiga did get it right by making the floppy ejection button a soft button, 
giving the OS time to do something with the request.  (Of course you can use a 
paperclip to override this, but that's not the normal usage case).

The fact remains that our hands are tied due to the defacto floppy drive 
standard.  You can either write immediately, minimising corruption and 
minimising performance, or do what Linux does now, and that's cache and write 
later and ask people to do the right thing and give the OS time to sync when 
doing a umount.  Either way, it's not a GNOME issue, but a Linux issue, and only 
so far as Linux supports PC floppy drives, which basically suck from a users 
perspective (capacity, sync, reliability).

As others have mentioned, other OSes don't do a great job with the PC floppy 
drive either.  At least Intel are now starting to talk about it's demise.

Michael...
-- 
Michael Davies                "Do what you think is interesting, do
michaeld senet com au          something that you think is fun and
mirky on irc                   worthwhile, because otherwise you won't
                               do it well anyway." -- Brian Kernighan


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