Re: [Utopia] persistent partition naming

[Kay Sievers <kay sievers vrfy org>]

On Sat, Apr 24, 2004 at 02:52:27PM +0200, David Zeuthen wrote:
> On Fri, 2004-04-23 at 17:43 +0200, Kay Sievers wrote:
> > > An open question
> > > is whether the mountpoint name is tied to the actual volume or the reader
> > > in which the volume is inserted? 
> > 
> > Hmm, maybe hal looks at the filesystem LABEL and takes it, if nothing
> > valuable is found, the name of the reader is used?
> > 
> 
> There's a lot of options basically - I've actually just hacked in some
> code a few weeks ago that set's block.volume_name for FAT filesystems,
> so this is indeed possible.

Did you see libblkid fron the ext2fs-utils? It reads uuids and labels from
all known filesystems. The approach of the library is a bit different,
but at least we can steal all the magic probe code from it :)

> > > [1] : In fact, AFAIK it's not possible to identify stuff like memory_stick,
> > > compact_flash or smart_media. But we can use a device information file to
> > > remedy this sitution. Here's an example for my 6in1 card reader
> > > 
> > >  http://freedesktop.org/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/hal/hal/fdi/20freedesktop/6in1-card-reader.fdi?rev=1.1&view=auto
> > 
> > Nice, I really like the idea of having a device database permanentely
> > installed on the system. What is the bigger picture here:
> > If in the near future the vendors are natively supporting linux :), what kind
> > of ".INF" file should they provide?
> > 
> 
> The idea is that information like this goes in the hal spec but that
> document kind of needs updating. Fortunately, few devices need files
> like that. 

What is the "hal spec"? It's different from the collection of .fdi-files?

I really liked the installer of a USB-dsl-modem on Windows. After
plugging in, it presents you with a selector for several predefined
provider configs and one custom config which lets you insert all the
values if nothing matches.
Most of the user will just select the provider and all is fine.
These questions are never asked again. This should work just fine for
the tv-tuner example too.

So we may need some device config file which provides predefined property
sets and a callout to let the user select one, or get custom values from
the user? Some tricky .fdi-file?
(hell, "callout" seems to be the word of the month :))

Hmm, and what about kernel modules which needs parameters like hisax
cards or some of the bttv tuner?
Wouldn't it be nice to have the ability to invoke a custom setup,
for the device from hal-manager, to rerun the setup?

> An interesting idea would be to let vendors provide an icon or some
> other branding for the device. Maybe it's far fetched, but perhaps that
> would be an incitement for them to support free operating systems.

Yes, that's nice, besides that most of the vendor icons are ugly as hell :)
But I've had a mobile phone with a nice looking icon and I really liked it
to catch it without reading the volumes name.
Nautilus may also offer the possibility to store a custom icon on the volume
itself?

thanks,
Kay