Policy to show drives/volumes

[Federico Mena Quintero <federico ximian com>]

Hi,

I'm looking at this bug:
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=321320

Right now we have four places where the user can see drives/volumes:

1. The file chooser shows all user-visible drives, and all user-visible
volumes with no associated drives.

2. The computer:/// method does the same as (1)

3. The desktop shows only user-visible modules (so e.g. you don't get a floppy
icon for unmounted floppies).

4. The Places sidebar in Nautilus does the same as (3).

The most visible inconsistency is (1) vs. (4).  Also, (1) sucks when you
plug in an USB multicard reader, since you get several entries of
"SanDisk Card Reader".

Let's say we follow a policy of showing only user-visible volumes, like
in (3) and (4).  In the magical world of HAL, gnome-volume-manager, and
friends, everything works perfectly *except* for floppies:  when you put
in a floppy in your drive, you don't get an icon because there is no
notification from the hardware.  Yes, mango-stained floppies are still
widely used over here in the third world :)

So I think we should only show user-visible modules, like in (3) and
(4), and have a special case for floppy drives in that we always show
them.

If this makes sense, my next question is how to detect whether a
GnomeVFSDrive is a floppy drive.  There's a GnomeVFSDeviceType
enumeration, but you can only get that for a GnomeVFSVolume, not a
GnomeVFSDrive.

[It is probably fine to have computer:/// show both drives and volumes;
there's no clutter since computer:/// is kind of hidden.]

Thoughts?

  Federico