Re: [Utopia] gnome-vfs patch, take one

[Sjoerd Simons <sjoerd luon net>]

On Thu, May 13, 2004 at 07:43:18PM +0200, David Zeuthen wrote:
> On Thu, 2004-05-13 at 19:16 +0200, Sjoerd Simons wrote:
> > > But I see little point in showing icons for unmounted volumes, I mean
> > > why should we in this patch assume g-v-m is not automounting media?
> > > And if the use for some reason have disabled automounting, he should
> > > be able to mount it himself from the commandline. That's my opinion
> > > anyway..
> > 
> > g-v-m will only mount media when it's inserted/hot-plugged. When one logs
> > in with a cdrom already inserted or a camera already plugged in nothing
> > happens.  Which is nice, because i don't really want my dvd player to
> > startup when i log, because i left a dvd in the drive or something like
> > that....
> > 
> 
> I submit that is a bug in g-v-m. 
> 
> When you login g-v-m should silently mount media and when you logout  it
> should unmount it. If you have enabled auto mounting, that is. Similar
> semantics should be implemented when someone gets around to implement
> fast user switching (or what's it called) on the console.

I'm always wondering how gvm is going to work out, when your various people
are simultaneously logged into one machine and all running gvm. Using
X-terminals for example. Multiple gvm's racing for a hotplugged volume, volumes
being unmounted when one of the users logs out.. But i don't know if that
really falls into gvm's scope... 

> > Also i don't think it's nice to ``force'' people to use the command line,
> > just because they don't use gvm or have disabled automount. But i'm not the
> > one writing the code :)
> > 
> 
> Anyway, I can see problems having icons for unmounted media. One of them
> is that we want to teach users to click unmount media before yanking it
> out of the computer 

I tried teaching my parents to use click umount before pulling out their
camera, but it just doesn't work. They forget about it and just yank it out and
untill now they've never had problems with it, so there is no reason to
remember it for them..

> - it would just feel odd if the icon didn't disappear, wouldn't it?
The icon should disappear from the desktop, but it's nice if there is an icon
in the ``computer '' when there is a volume available but not mounted. Which is
also the current behavour.. 

On the other hand, i don't want icons there on things that i can't mount anyway
(stuff like an apple bootblock and partition map for example). But that's a 
more general problem, because there is currently no way to know before hand
what can be mounted or not afaik. For example the fstab-update callout, also 
shouldn't really put things like that in my fstab.
 
> It's not that I'm totally against changing this behavior, I just see
> little gain and potential usability problems. And in certain cases, my
> experience tells me that the person writing the code should be the last
> one to decide policy and defaults :-)

When someone indeed is using gvm with the proposed automounting behaviour, 
there isn't much gain. I just wouldn't want to force people into using gvm with
automounting enabled.

  Sjoerd
-- 
One Bell System - it used to work before they installed the Dimension!