Re: [PATCH] computer:/// should display all drives, not only user-visible ones

[Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On Wed, 2006-06-07 at 09:43 -0400, David Zeuthen wrote:
> On Wed, 2006-06-07 at 14:51 +0200, Xavier Claessens wrote:
> > > I don't really follow your reasoning fully. I agree that users want to
> > > see their OSX and/or windows mounts from linux, but I think you
> > > over-empasize the "single user, dual boot, home desktop" usecase. In the
> > > case of more traditional sysadmined unix setups (at universities and
> > > whatnot) you'll have a bunch of bizzare mountpoints (nfs mounts, autofs
> > > mounts, tmpfs, /usr, /home, extra drives/partitions, etc). 
> > > 
> > > If we were to show all these, then I think things would look pretty
> > > confusing. I really think we need to hide a bunch of mountpoints. Some
> > > mountpoints can probably be hardcoded
> > > (like /proc, /tmp/, /home, /opt/*, /usr, and /boot), but we can never
> > > think of all possibilities, so we should probably have a way to mark
> > > them.
> 
> Yea, of course we should hide such bizarre mount points. My point was
> merely we ought to show drives/mounts even if the user is not privileged
> to mount them.
> 
> > > 
> > 
> > We should only display "/media/*" and "/mnt/*"
> 
> Yup, that's one option, maybe just resort to showing entries from /media
> then alexl's /mnt/hdb1 drive won't be shown (and if alexl wants it to be
> shown he can move the mount point to /media). Personally I think we
> should just hide all the directories and subdirs as defined by FHS2.3.
> We do that here
> 
> http://cvs.gnome.org/viewcvs/gnome-vfs/libgnomevfs/gnome-vfs-hal-mounts.c?view=markup
> 
> in function _hal_volume_policy_check() though I'm unsure whether this
> code is used at the moment (will look into that).

Well, the bug report:
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=341446
showed drives for things like / and /home. So something is going wrong
here. I see a _hal_drive_policy_check that is empty though.

Anyway, what i think we should do is:

Have a policy for what mountpoints to create drives for. Be it by
blacklisting or whitelisting. If the policy says the mountpoint
shouldn't have a drive then we don't even create one.

Set is_user_visible to false on drives that support auto-mounting, so we
can hide them everywhere but in computer:///.

I think blacklisting will probably work well enough, but you probably
need to add more stuff than just the toplevel FHS mountpoints, for
instance /dev/shmem and common non-linux mountpoints. 

Also, it looks like you create drives based on currently mounted volumes
that are not in fstab? This will generate a bunch of drives when using
things like autofs for separate /home/<user> mountpoints and cause
things like /proc/bus/usb to get drives. Does it ever make sense to
create a drive object for a volume like this? It'll only live as long as
the volume and you can't really use it for anything.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
 Alexander Larsson                                            Red Hat, Inc 
                   alexl redhat com    alla lysator liu se 
He's a time-tossed coffee-fuelled inventor on his last day in the job. She's a 
warm-hearted mutant research scientist from a different time and place. They 
fight crime!