Re: [Rhythmbox-devel] RFC: removable media

[John McCutchan <ttb tentacle dhs org>]

On Mon, 2004-03-22 at 05:24, Christophe Fergeau wrote:
> I haven't had time to look at your proposal in details, but I'm not sure
> this "physical location attribute" should be stored by rhythmbox in its
> database. Most of the code used by nautilus to deal with removable
> medias, mount points and stuff like that has moved to gnome-vfs 2.6, so
> it's available for use by any gnome app. This framework may provide
> enough functionalities to do what you want without needing to interface
> directly with hal. I'm mentioning that now in case you are about to
> start implementing this "physical location attribute" ;)

The gnome-vfs-volume code added for gnome-vfs 2.6, really only deals
with mount points. Using mount point information through gnome-vfs
offers no solutions to the problems in my original mail. The point of
the physical attribute is to go beyond mere mount points. We need a way
for rhythmbox to associate a path with the physical device it is on.
Here is an example where mount points will fail.

User mounts all usb drives here:

/mnt/usbdrive

user has two usb drives with music on it. consider this time line:

-user mounts drive 1, adds some music to rhythmbox.
-after finishing listening to music user umounts drive 1
-user mounts drive 2
-user launches rhythmbox
-rhythmbox does not see the files that were in /mnt/usbdrive
-rhythmbox deletes files from database.
-later on, user remounts drive 1 and loads rhythmbox
-user must re-add music that was on device 1.


adding a unique permanent physical key to each file in the database, we
now have the new time line:

-user mounts drive 1, adds some music to rhythmbox.
-after finishing listening to music user umounts drive 1
-user mounts drive 2
-user launches rhythmbox
-rhythmbox does not see the files that were in /mnt/usbdrive
-rhythmbox tags the files as being unavailable.
	because /mnt/usbdrive's physical key is different.
-later on, user remounts drive 1 and loads rhythmbox
-rhytmbox sees the files that were in /mnt/usbdrive
-rhythmbox tags the files as being available.


A similar time line could be constructed for the problem of one drive,
that is not always mounted.

Clarification, when I say 'tag' i mean mark the database entry.

John