Re: gnome-disk-utility volume monitor

[David Zeuthen <david fubar dk>]

On Mon, 2009-03-02 at 15:42 +0100, Jannis Pohlmann wrote:
> Hey,
> 
> On Mon, 02 Mar 2009 00:27:58 -0500
> David Zeuthen <david fubar dk> wrote:
> 
> > Hey,
> > 
> > Here we go with the new native volume monitor to replace the HAL
> > volume monitor. This volume monitor uses the gnome-disk-utility
> > library (which is also used in the Palimpsest Disk Utility) which in
> > turn uses DeviceKit-disks. Which in turn is the replacement for HAL.
> 
> we're about to adopt GIO/GVfs in Xfce and I'm a little concerned about
> GNOME dependencies in GVfs. AFAIR, the HAL monitor already depends on
> gnome-mount which means that in Xfce we'd have to write our own HAL
> monitor just to replace gnome-mount with exo-mount. With a dependency
> on gnome-disk-utility our situation doesn't get any better, even if it's
> optional (a lot of distributions will probably make it a hard
> dependency anyway).
> 
> So, I wonder ... wouldn't it make more sense to write a monitor solely
> based on DeviceKit-disks to keep things desktop agnostic? 

Surely you can do that but note that the DeviceKit-disks D-Bus API is
unstable and will be for some time. FWIW, it's not something I'm
interested in doing; there's a bunch of client-side business logic in
libgdu that doesn't make sense to have in the DeviceKit-disks daemon.
And it doesn't make sense to have two copies (one in GVfs and one in
gnome-disk-utility). So that's why I decided to have a base GObject
based library with this stuff.

FWIW, the major deps for libgdu.so are currently something like this

 - libdbus-glib
 - libpolkit-dbus
 - libgnome-keyring
 - libgio

I expect libdbus-glib to be replaced by libeggdbus-1 (and down the road
libeggdbus might land in the GLib tarball under a different name) and I
also expect there will be a gconf dependency or some other configuration
system (which some day may be something GSettings which would also be in
the GLib tarball). And polkit-dbus will be replaced by
libpolkit-gobject-1 when porting to PolicyKit 1.0.

I don't think any of these dependencies are GNOMEy at all; maybe
gnome-keyring but that is already used in gvfs in other places.

So is this really a problem?

    David