[Rhythmbox-devel] Rhythmbox interacts lethally with coda filesystem

[shivers ccs neu edu]

I am running rhythmbox on an AMD64 ubuntu 7.10 system. I'm also using
the coda network filesystem. The two don't get along.

Coda is a network filesystem that supports disconnected operation.
It is like AFS, except that you may continue to do operations on
the filesystem if your computer is off the net (e.g., using your
notebook on an airplane). After you reconnect, the coda client resyncs
to the server. You typically mount the coda fs on /coda.

If I have rhythmbox running, as soon at I start up coda, it greys out, puts
"coda" under the "devices" heading in the left pane, and then... goes away.
Strace shows that it is wandering over the coda filesystem, very laboriously
and slowly. My cpu meter pegs at 100% for the roughly hour or so that it takes
rhythmbox to crawl my 2.5 Gb filesystem (which seems like a long time to cover
a couple of thousand files, *none* of which end in .flac or .mp3 or are
otherwise recognisably music files). After that, the cpu meter reverts back to
normal, but rhythmbox continues to stay catatonic.

Now, the first thing I can't figure out is why rhythmbox is exploring /coda in
the first place. What is giving rhythmbox license to just go chasing down some
random part of my computer's file tree? From the fact that "coda" appears
under "devices," it appears that rhythmbox believes, for some reason, that my
/coda mount is a device, e.g., like an ipod mount. But why? 

To discard some possibilities for the lossage:
- that I have *no* plugins turned on.
- My library location is completely distinct from my /coda partition.

If I unmount /coda, rhythmbox starts up just fine. As soon as I remount
it, however, rhythmbox detects and goes off into hyperspace. There appear
to be no options that permit me to turn off this, ah, feature.

If I try this on a 32bit x86 Fedora system, I don't lose quite so badly.
Rhythmbox notices /coda, reports it as a device, and begins to walk it,
but doesn't grey out and I can click on the "coda" entry and select "eject"
from the menu. At this point, rhythmbox complains 
    Unable to eject media.
    eject: unable to find or open device for: `coda'
But the good part is that the "coda" device entry in the left pain goes
away and I'm in business.

Can anyone advise me on why this is happening on my AMD64 Ubuntu system and
how I might work around it? I can't run with my filesystem turned off, so if I
can't resolve it, I'll have to look into using another music app, which I
also don't want to do: I like rhythmbox.
    -Olin