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

[David Zeuthen <david fubar dk>]

Hi, 

thanks for getting back to me,

On Mon, 2004-05-17 at 11:36 +0200, Alexander Larsson wrote:
> On Fri, 2004-05-14 at 17:09, David Zeuthen wrote:
> > It would be a change, yes. I'm happy to change it though, but I'm not
> > sure how to do it in a good way.
> 
> I'd like that. There are a couple of reasons I like about having icons
> for devices for removable media:
> * We need it for some types of media. The trivial and most common
> example is the floppy, but there is probably more. If we do it for
> floppys its nice if we do the same for e.g. cdroms.

Floppies indeed seem to be the only problem if you look at how e.g. Mac
OS X handles removable media (not showing drives). Mac OS X has the same
hard semantics on mounting removable media like other UNIX-like systems
so GNOME should be able to treat media the same way.

Now suppose floppies is really the only problem and there existed a
gnome-vfs module using mtools, would you consider including that module
in gnome-vfs. Would OS vendors ship it? 

(disclaimer: I'm not sure how that would work, so please advise if it's
been tried before etc. etc.).

> * It gives a location in the user interface where you can discover the
> media-related hardware. And its stable, so when you mount it the volume
> icon is in the same place as the cdrom was.
> * We are exposing "unmount" to users, since they have to remember to
> unmount e.g. a usb media before yanking it. This automatically gives you
> the state "media in device, but not mounted", which makes it sensible to
> expose the dual operation (mount) to be "complete". And mount requires a
> device representation before the volume is mounted.
> 

First of all I think it would be visual clutter to expose drives without
media in the user interface. After all the user does know what drives
are available since he is sitting right there in front of his computer
or printer or where ever the drives are physically placed. 

Further, for discovering devices handling removable storage I think
something like hal-device-manager [1] (but written properly etc.) would
suffice. In fact, I've seen many users on Windows get scared of all the
grey icons with very odd letters like C:, D: etc. Especially Windows
screw you here with multi-card readers; the user has to manually try
four drive letters to find his media. In GNOME, it's not unlikely that
the name of icons for the drives in computer:// would be plain odd like
6in1-MMC/SD.

Second, if you assume the floppy issue is solved, I simply see no need
for not automounting volumes. Going to the extreme I submit it's a bug
in gnome-volume-manager that the user can turn off automounting.

Third, I think I would find it rather confusing that an icon changes
from a drive icon to e.g. a compact flash icon and back. Icons in
computer:// should really try to represent spatial stuff users relate to
like a piece of compact flash media, an icon of a camera, a music
player, a DVD disc and maybe even a file server. Users don't relate as
strongly to the drive, that's just boring necessary glue that enables
them to use their media.

[snip]

> > I also thought about a multi-level approach: 
> > 
> >  - 6in1 card reader
> >   - compact flash
> >   - smart media
> >   - sd-mmc
> >   - memory stick
> > 
> > with volumes popping in and out at the third level as appropriate.
> 
> I dunno. It'll complicate the UI and the APIs require changes. I think
> this is a bit overengineered in practice, since normal people don't have
> several 6in1 card readers and other stuff, so it won't be that crowded
> anyway.
> 

I completely agree here, lots of unneeded information in that scheme.

One reason in favor of including icons for drives with media that you
haven't mentioned is to maintain the same look and feel as present
today. Even though I may not agree with that (but I do understand why it
has to be like this, mostly portability since only fstab and mtab can be
assumed), I can see the benefits in not changing it. 

Anyway, I won't have time to finish the patch before next week anyway
because I'll be away from computers wed-sun, so please let me know if I
should put drives in or not  - I don't feel too strongly on the issue.

Cheers,
David

[1] : like e.g. http://freedesktop.org/~david/hal-usb-mounted.png