Re: THE LINUX REMOVABLE DEVICE PETITION

[nf <nf2 scheinwelt at>]

On Thu, 2004-06-24 at 08:18, Ikke wrote: 
> > Gnome-VFS is the wrong place for this, because the special umount
> > command which suspends monitoring needs to become standard for all
> > desktops. The lightweight ones also. There should be no
> > GNOME-dependencies. It needs to be tiny and simple - to get widely
> > adopted.
> Thats what I think too.
> 
> > FAM really needs a control and status API.
> > 
> > Btw, what do you think of a gerneric "libdirmonitoring"-API, which sits
> > on top of FAM and provides the "smumount" (Suspend monitoring and
> > umount) function. Such a generic layer could also help to replace FAM
> > lateron.
> That's +- what we tried to achieve in libProcNotification I guess. At
> a certain level. 

Yes. But FAM needs some changes too... :-(

When you call FAMSuspendMonitor(), fam does not close the filedescriptor
used for monitoring via dnotify. Therefore umount stays blocked. So a
redesign of fam's dnotify bridge would be necessary.

For "smumount" special control functions
FAMSuspendAllMonitors() and FAMResumeAllMonitors() would be required.
The problem is, that any user could invoke them. 

I wonder if it wouldn't be easier to make something like "nonotify" (or
inotify) work, but "nonotify" might be conflicting with "supermount" and
"submount". And i still don't know how this special stat() system call
for nonotify can be put into practice.

As for the petition in general: I didn't get a clear and convincing
response yet, which direction linux should go: (1) To fix fam & dnotify
& umount -f or (2) use "proxy-filesystems" which always stay mounted
like "supermount" and "submount". Anyway - maybe i'm overestimating the
importance of this problem...

Norbert