Re: question about Unmount/Eject on removable media menus

[David Zeuthen <david fubar dk>]

On Sun, 2009-05-17 at 17:03 -0400, Peter F. Patel-Schneider wrote:
> >    2. virtually all USB sticks
> >    
> Why would a USB stick report "ejectable"?  This is what I don't understand.

[...]

> >   4. USB and Firewire hard disk enclosures
> >    
> These seem somehow to be the same as a USB stick as far as unmount and 
> eject go.

The thing is, there is no reliable way to determine if a device is a USB
disk or a USB enclosure. The device itself will report if it supports
removable media or not (part of the IDENTIFY response) and that's what
we key off.

> What about drives in removable bays?  What got me into this entire area 
> was trying to figure out how to best handle the removal of a bay that 
> has a disk in it.  This bay (Lenovo Ultrabay) is actually quite nice as 
> it has a pre-eject signal, which can be used to get the device ready for 
> physical removal.  However, in Fedora (and most other distributions) 
> nothing gets hooked to this signal.  I was hoping that there would be 
> something built-in that would do an "eject", i.e., unmount all 
> partitions and turn off the disk (and maybe the bay as well).

It sounds interesting to support this kind of scenario but it has
nothing to do with what we normally refer to as "eject" and I don't
think it would be helpful to overload the term "eject" for this. I think
it would be better to refer to this as "safely remove hardware" and

 - have a way in Nautilus (in the sidebar probably) to "safely
   remove" things like a drive bay. Probably another option in the
   context menu, maybe a "Stop" icon next to the "Eject" icon, I don't
   know.

 - hook up to whatever event we get and then unmount/eject the device
   as appropriate

 - maybe have an applet or notification icon for this

If doing this work, we'd probably also want to cover things like docking
stations since they need a similar treatment (and may include disks as
well).

     David