[Utopia] Re: [patch] one-to-many HAL integration

[David Zeuthen <david fubar dk>]

On Thu, 2004-08-12 at 16:23 -0400, Joe Shaw wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> On Thu, 2004-08-12 at 13:17 -0700, Sriram Ramkrishna wrote:
> > I'm trying to write my iriver driver which is not based on the
> > usb mass storage driver but I have to communicate with the iriver
> > mp3 player using USB commands.  But I want to be able to have the
> > gnome-vfs daemon detect that the iriver is plugged in through HAL.
> > 
> > Currently davidz's patch does not address this corner case as it
> > only receives from the HAL dbus channel events where the capability
> > of the device is something the kernel sees as a 'disk'.  But the
> > capability would have to go into gnome-vfs proper but thats not
> > really optimal as you would have to support a lot of usb devices that
> > uses libusb instead of usb mass storage.  
> 
> My feeling is that a specific tool would be better suited to this than a
> generic VFS backend.  That is, support for this kind of device makes
> sense in rhythmbox or some HAL-utilizing middle library that can
> abstract it away for a lot of similar devices.
> 

IIRC, the consensus was (or at least what Alex said :-), was that it
makes sense to expose devices, whose primary and maybe secondary use is
storage of random files, in gnome-vfs and Nautilus. And I believe mp3
players fall into this category.

Also, many devices, especially cameras support by libgphoto2, only
allows one process to access the device at one time (e.g. Nautilus and
gThumb would compete for the device). I wonder, does gnome-vfs help with
arbitrating access here?

Cheers,
David