Re: [Utopia] KDE Volume Manager

[David Zeuthen <david fubar dk>]

Hi,

Sorry for not responding earlier; I think it's very cool to see the KDE
volume manager happening; great work!

(side item: care to point me to some (generic perhaps?) instructions on
how to compile it? I'm staring at a configure.in.in and no autogen.sh
etc. Thanks.)

On Fri, 2004-08-20 at 10:42 +0200, Jerome Lodewyck wrote:
> > > Besides, it would greatly benefit from the following HAL properties:
> > >  - volume.disc.has_dvd_video : true when a disc is a video DVD
> > >  - same as above for VCDs
> >
> > Can you get these two things without mounting the device?
> 
> That's what I was wondering...  Concerning DVD, it is easy to mount it,
> check for tracks and eventually play it. But for VCD, it is much more
> complicated since xine (I haven't checked other players) doesn't play
> mounted VCD's. So the steps are : mounting, checking for tracks,
> unmounting and playing. Quite tricky and lengthy. So a volume.disc.is_vcd
> would be much more convenient.
> 

Yup, we kind of discussed what the hal daemon should and shouldn't do on
the hal mailing list on freedesktop.org a while back. I think the
conclusion was that HAL should stay out of policy and only care about
presenting the device objects it sees in a somewhat abstract way with
minimal interference to the system (e.g. don't do any invasive polling
etc. that breaks existing software).

I do think that the stack as it looks right now allows for gvm and kvm
to do these tasks you are talking about insofar that I think it's OK to
assume that gvm and kvm are the only processes (they of course don't run
at the same time) that actually implements the policy of mounting and
unmounting volumes. 

And since it involves policy (mounting/unmounting) I think kvm/gvm is
the right place in the stack to do this. It would be cool, however, to
share some of this code between gvm and gvm though; one thing to do
would be to stick it in a library libhal-volume (could have native Qt
bindings) and ship it with hal?

Another reason for doing this is that we could share code (and, perhaps
more important, policy) for actually selecting the icons representing
the volume and the name representing the volume, see
http://freedesktop.org/~david/gnome-vfs-take3-1.png for how GNOME VFS
does this when built with --enable-hal. The result would be greater
integration between e.g. Konqueror and Nautilus and some standardisation
on the icon names. Heck, even fstab-sync could use this library for
creating mount point names.

Just a thought.

Cheers,
David