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

[David Zeuthen <david fubar dk>]

On Tue, May 18, 2004 at 02:06:19PM +0200, Alexander Larsson wrote:
> > Notwithstanding all this, this cd burning apps are able to unmount the
> > volume themselves (part of the utopia stack updates the fstab entry
> > with flags user) and they could acquire an advisory lock on the hal
> > device to signal that the device is being used exclusively and no
> > other application using hal would touch the device and hal itself
> > would stop polling (note, not yet implemented but see discussion on
> > xdg-list Sep/Oct 2003).
>
> Sure, we can work around all sorts of things in all the apps. Its just
> an example where things break down.

You're missing the point which is to handle hardware well there needs
to be a common platform that all applications use. What you're pointing
out is the visible effects of the lack of said platform.

Sure, I can write an application that does all sort of fun like
assuming /dev/cdrom is the default optical drive or that no one else
will use the device while burning.

> > But isn't these problems just an effect of broken drivers and not
> > broken hardware? (again, I have no real data other than it works on
> > other operating systems etc. etc.)
>
> If you ask kernel guys they will tell you all hardware is broken. That
> seems to be the norm, especially with cheap pc hardware.
>
> > > The last time this argument was going on I ended up on the pragmatic
> > > side, going with devices visible in the UI. I feel that there are 
> > > good
> > > arguments on both sides, however we once made a decision, and its now
> > > implemented and even exposed in the APIs. So, I would prefer if we 
> > > kept
> > > the current way instead of changing again. At least thats my current
> > > opinion, although I don't violently disagree with your position 
> > > either.
> >
> > Ok, I'll admit my position isn't really pragmatic (I assume that all
> > drivers and hardware just work according to spec), and, oh, maybe I do
>
> You will learn truth eventually and become old and bitter like the rest
> of us.

Oh, I'm getting there, don't you worry :-)

Anyway, I suppose we could sit all day and discuss whether it's the
hardware, the drivers or both. I've seen random comments on whether
Linux got good or bad hardware support, but I've never seen a big
matrix or any other hard data. Probably because the UI is pretty weak
for handling hardware bugs - I mean, why shouldn't bug-buddy not work
for reporting broken hardware?

I've noted already that another UNIX-like desktop handles the
relatively small subset of hardware that is interesting for gnome-vfs
and nautilus (usb storage class devices, IEEE1394 sbp2 class devices,
IDE devices, SCSI devices) pretty well with random hardware.

> > Anyway, would you accept a patch that reads a gconf value whether to
> > show/hide drives or not? :-)
>
> Of course not, that would be the absolutely worst "solution". Whenever
> things don't work people will turn on showing drives to work around it,
> and we'll never get to fix the bugs.

I'm not sure what you're saying here. Your initial point of view was
to include the drives when no media is there but in this configuration
bugs like that would never turn up.

> Instead there will be two totally different models of handling
> volumes out there amongst users and lots of random ideas when to
> apply this workaround.

I'll add the drives, but it won't be pretty :-)

Cheers,
David