Re: THE LINUX REMOVABLE DEVICE PETITION

[James Willcox <jwillcox gnome org>]

On Wed, 2004-06-23 at 13:38 +0200, Alexander Larsson wrote:
> On Wed, 2004-06-23 at 00:48, nf wrote:
> > Hi!
> > 
> > I have created a website to point out the main issues with removable
> > devices and unmounting - a place to collect information and to discuss
> > possible solutions.
> > 
> > http://www.scheinwelt.at/~norbertf/petition/
> > 
> > Please help me improving it, add comments and links, discuss it...
> > 
> > Work in progress...
> 
> While I agree with yor view that we should have a notification system
> that doesn't block unmounts I'd like to point that we *do* try to fix
> this issue in nautilus. Whenever something is unmounted using nautilus
> (or any app using gnome-vfs to unmount) the pre_unmount signal is sent
> to all apps using GnomeVFSVolumeMonitor. When nautilus gets this signal,
> it immediately unmonitors any mounts on that device.
> 
> It might be the case that this doesn't always work. I know that
> historically there has been issues with this, including fam sometimes
> leaking file descriptors that made this not work, but I'm not currently
> aware of anything being broken.

Also, fam/gamin/whatever could probably just refuse to monitor files
which reside on read-only filesystems (which I think nautilus already
checks for).  That would at least solve the common problem of cdroms not
ejecting, and so forth.

James