Re: gnome-disk-utility volume monitor

[David Zeuthen <david fubar dk>]

On Mon, 2009-03-02 at 17:08 +0100, Jannis Pohlmann wrote:
> What about moving the relevant parts of libgdu into the GVfs monitor and
> then making gnome-disk-utility use GIO/GVfs to detect disks? I don't
> know how gnome-disk-utility is implemented but I wonder about the
> direction of the dependency. IMHO it sounds more reasonable to make a
> disk utility application depend on a VFS layer instead of making a VFS
> layer depend on a part of a disk utility application.
> 
> But, yeah, I don't know about the code, so you probably have reasons to
> do it this way.

GIO only shows user-visible volumes; in the Palimpsest Disk Utility we
are concerned with things like swap, RAID components, LUKS devices and,
in the future, lots of other things. 

And there's a significant amount of logic needed for *presentation* of
storage devices (hence why it's not in the DeviceKit-disks daemon)
because, well, because storage in UNIX is so much *fun* to deal with:
partitioning (in particular extended and logical partitions),
device-mapper, Linux MD, SMART data, the list goes on...

> I've read about moving something like dbus-glib into GLib. That's fine.
> What about polkit-gnome? GConf IMHO is a pure GNOME dependency since it
> is not used by other desktops like Xfce or LXDE.

PolicyKit-gnome is not a dependency of libgdu (it's a dependency of
libgdu-gtk though). It will not be moved to GTK+, it's too tied to UNIX
like systems and other platforms on which GTK+ runs on have other
mechanisms for the same thing.

> > 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.
> 
> Yeah, that's one of the other GNOME dependencies in GVfs I'm not really
> happy with. GIO being part of GLib means that it's the only *real* VFS
> choice for any GLib/GTK+ application. That being said, one of the goals
> of GVfs should be to be truely desktop agnostic IMHO. And a lot of
> desktops don't use gnome-keyring at all.

Well, the one response here is that you can always build GVfs without
gnome-keyring support. But in reality that's a useless thing to say, it
of course won't work in the typical "let's ship everything" distro.

Another response would be that, at the end of the day, GVfs is just
*one* set of extensions for GIO and no-one prevents you from creating an
XFCE set of extensions for GIO. Of course that's not really practical
either, I mean, you don't want to duplicate 100K lines of pretty hairy
code "just because".

But at least the purists can always opt to not install GVfs, all apps
using GIO will continue to work.

So I don't really have a good response to any of this; the way I see it,
GConf and gnome-keyring are currently pretty hard deps in GVfs and I
don't expect that to change until someone invents something better
either at the GLib level or at the freedesktop.org level.

Of course this is just my view of the world, Alex is the GVfs maintainer
and he might have different views on this.

     David