Re: Floppy disk access in Gnome.

[Sean Middleditch <elanthis awesomeplay com>]

On Mon, Oct 29, 2001 at 06:10:05AM -0500, Adam Williams wrote:
> >Erg, at least you are admitting it's a kernel issue.  ~,^
> >That is were it ends.  What do you expect GNOME to do?  We can automount
> >already, there are automounter projects currently available.  Make a GTK
> >configuration program for them if you think it will help.
> >If you tie it to GNOME, then only GNOME apps will use it, not
> >KDE/GTk/console/X/whatever apps; just GNOME ones.  That would be pretty
> >damn stupid.
> 
> One would have to use the GNOME VFS and write a "floppy" filesystem.  If
> tar files can be made browseable and ftp made to look like a filesystem
> then why not a floppy via the library used by mtools?

Because it would really suck.  And not solve the CD problem.  And not be
overly portable, most likely.  Not to mention only work with FAT disks.

>  
> >Even if you go with current automounters, one of the original issues
> >brought up in this thread was when users just pull out disks.  Those
> >will still get clobbered or whatnot, by the kenel, unless you constantly
> 
> I'd like to point out that this ***DOES*** happen on Windows,  trashed
> disks that is.  And windows crashes when it thinks the floppy is there
> and the user has yanked it.  Or it get's confused about what floppy is
> in the drive after you cycle around a few of them.  After being bitten
> by this several times,  and having users bitten by it many times (and
> they just don't understand)  I am very ***grateful*** for the
> mount/unmount procedure.  The drivemount applet (IMHO) makes this really
> easy and visually apparent.

Yes, but the originally complainer said that anything is too hard for
some people.  Which is a valid point.  But GNOME can't really fix it.

> 
> >scan a mounted volume to see if it is still there, which would be damned
> >ugly.  Perhaps a powerful automounting/autoumounting daemon could be
> 
> So ugly I doubt it would work very well.  If you want truly removable
> media I think you have to avoid mounting in the first place and use some
> "direct" access, aka mtools.

My point exactly.  Very ugly.  It would need direct access, or a kernel
level fix.  The direct access would be even uglier, tho.

> 
> Besides having to flush I/O operations after every operation (slow) the
> problem with an automounter would be that alot of PC hardware doesn't
> report when a disk has been changed,  so you'd need to check.  It can
> potentially be hard to tell, and it always very slow.
> 

Yes, but the advantage of an automounter is the problem is solved no
worse than GNOME would end up doing, and it wouldn't be tied in my GUI.