Re: [Nautilus-list] Re: File manager integration with magicdev

[Andrew Post <apost cbmi upmc edu>]

Devfs should help. I'll have to look into what kind of information it
can provide. Devfs seems like it would complicate mount point naming by
quite a lot. I suppose you could dynamically create mount points as
devices are detected. But a system would have to be developed for naming
them. Are device names in devfs unique? Could disc0 be found in some
other hierarchy, like /dev/floppies/disc0?

Thanks,

Andrew

Seth Nickell wrote:
> 
> Mabye what you are looking for is devfs? The current /dev filesystem is
> not engineered to have things dynamically created etc as they exist or
> don't exist. Having scripts that do this is a major hack and fails to
> deal with important classes of devices such as hotpluggable USB,
> firewire, pcmcia, etc. The "proper" solution to this (if not the
> complete solution, its a step in the right direction) is DevFS and
> exists in the 2.4.x kernel series, though it is not enabled by default.
> It only lists devices it thinks exists, but moreover they are arranged
> in an informative heirarchy.
> 
> So for example there is /dev/cdroms/cdrom0 and /dev/discs/disc0 and
> /dev/discs/disc1 on my system (and much more of course). In addition
> there is an IDE chain directory /dev/ide/host0/bus1/target0/lun0/disc
> (and also existant partitions on that disc). The system still could be
> improved, but the groundwork is there. Now its just a matter of waiting
> until it gets turned on by default in shipping distributions (maybe it
> is in RH7.1?) and we could start using it for Linux systems.
> 
> -Seth
> 
> Andrew Post wrote:
> >
> > I haven't looked at these changes to gmc or magicdev, admittedly, but
> > both have usually attempted to identify devices by the device name
> > aliases, name of mount point, and/or filesystem type. Unfortunately,
> > filesystem type only works for CD-ROMS, distros don't agree on device
> > name aliases, the device name aliasing system in use by Redhat and
> > others is incomplete, and no distro that I know of is capable of
> > accurately installing device aliases for every removable device on a
> > system. Mandrake 7.2 is the best I've seen so far, and it still created
> > a link to /dev/fd0 on my laptop's desktop even though I don't have a
> > standard floppy installed. The kernel figured out that I don't have a
> > floppy: why didn't the script that created the link listen to it? I had
> > two cd-rom drives on my desktop machine for a time. Mandrake and SuSE
> > both installed a link for only one of them, even though the kernel
> > detected both. Sure, there's an accepted practice of calling a cd-rom
> > drive /dev/cdrom. But what if you have 2 of them? Apparently, the
> > developers at Mandrake and SuSE didn't know either.
> >
> > The kernel knows that hardware is installed, so we should use the
> > information it provides. What makes a lot more sense is for nautilus
> > and/or an automounter to directly use a device detection library like
> > kudzu or libdetect to find removable devices. With these libraries, it
> > doesn't matter what the device alias or mount point is named, and we can
> > provide useful information to the user about the device, a feature
> > that's missing from every Linux file manager (hint, hint...). The kernel
> > /proc filesystem contains all of the information we need to dynamically
> > configure an ACCURATE list of removable devices. Unfortunately, not a
> > single distro actually uses much of it for this purpose.
> >
> > No one is reinventing the wheel, Owen, because good removable device
> > support for Linux doesn't exist yet. We're not even close.
> >
> > Andrew
> >
> > --
> > Andrew Post, M.D.
> > MSIS Student, School of Information Science
> > Fellow, Center for Biomedical Informatics
> > University of Pittsburgh
> > Suite 8084 Forbes Tower
> > 200 Lothrop Street
> > Pittsburgh, PA 15213-2582
> > (412) 647-7275
> >
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> 
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-- 
Andrew Post, M.D.
MSIS Student, School of Information Science
Fellow, Center for Biomedical Informatics
University of Pittsburgh
Suite 8084 Forbes Tower
200 Lothrop Street
Pittsburgh, PA 15213-2582
(412) 647-7275