Re: Volume handling proposal

[Shaun McCance <shaunm wolfram com>]

On Thu, 2003-09-18 at 03:27, Tuomas Kuosmanen wrote:
> On Wed, 2003-09-17 at 14:08, Ross Burton wrote:
> 
> > If Nautilus shows me icons on the desktop for NFS mounts, I'd have 7 NFS
> > icons on my desktop at work...  We have a set of machines serving
> > filestores over NFS, and all of them integrated into / (mounting at
> > various points in /home mainly) so I do not want them on the desktop.
> 
> Is that bad? I mean, if you have stuff there, you probably want to
> access them too. On Macs you have all your mounts on the desktop  and it
> works very well, since those are a good way to access them. 

The whole point of the UNIX approach is that it just doesn't matter what
disk/server/whatever is providing a particular part of your filesystem. 
This is a good conceptual model for some things, and not so good for
others.  With removable media, it's certainly natural to think in terms
of the disc, because a users can clearly see that they're inserting some
media, and that the data comes from that.

My home directory at work is on an NFS mount.  In fact, due to the fact
that NFS sucks hard, there are three NFS servers for home directories
alone, and a mount point for each.  I really don't care about these
mounts any more than I care that /usr is on a separate partition.

I would say that one of the weaknesses of the Mac approach is that it
throws all of this irrelevant information at you.  It was just an
artifact of the design of the operating system in MacOS 9 and earlier. 
Now it's just a holdover.

Forcing users to think in terms of disks and partitions is just silly.

I have nine NFS mounts on my work machine.  Only one of them makes sense
on my desktop.  In fact, I have a link to it on my desktop now.

I don't think NFS mounts and local partitions should be on the desktop
by default.  These could all be shown under "Computer" or whatever, and
then perhaps they could each have a "Show on Desktop" option.

--
Shaun