Re: [Utopia] [patch] improved hal support for gnome-vfs

[Bryan Clark <bclark redhat com>]

Hey ~

David threatened to punch me in the face if I didn't respond to this.

On Fri, 2005-07-01 at 11:15 -0400, David Zeuthen wrote:
> On Fri, 2005-07-01 at 10:43 -0400, Robert Love wrote:
> > 
> > >  - show a GnomeVFSDrive even when there is no media in the drive
> > 
> > Hrm, that is a lot of media readers to show on my desktop that are
> > entirely unusable.  I'd prefer to show icons for media, not drives.  So
> > if there is a removable drive with no media, we don't show it.
> 
> Yea, I dunno. Before this patch you would sometime see a drive for your
> optical drive or IDE Zip drive but not one for your USB Zip Drive. So,
> this is basically to be more consistent. 
> 
> I also like the fact that people see that the system recognizes the
> drive. And, you know, I think when we get e.g. icons for "Compact Flash
> Drive" and perhaps a view in Nautilus that divides drives into
> categories (a'la WinXP?) this will be much clearer, don't you think? But
> it's really a HCI question; I just wrote some code :-)
> 
> Another thing is that if you want only to see media, not drives, this is
> what you use the "Places" menu for in the desktop / look at icons on the
> desktop.

I saw this in action and I thought it looked pretty good.  A couple
points I wanted to emphasize/agree with.

I think there should be only one icon per device attached, even if this
a multi-drive device.  Having lots of different different drives for a
single device seems a little crazy.  David tells me that this is kind of
necessary because of random bad hardware devices in the wild.  This will
be the first thing I change when I take over the world, well maybe not
the first but it's high on the list.

The drives should only show up in the "Computer" view from nautilus.
Unless this is a drive without new media notification, i.e. a floppy/zip
disk drive it shouldn't appear in the Desktop/Places/File Open dialog,
only media should appear there.  I think it's fine to work under the
assumption that the "Computer" view is just for people who need to look
at their computer hardware for odd reasons.  Assuming everything else is
centered around real media, this seems like an appropriate place to show
this kind of information.

The "Computer" view is going to get a little cluttered with all these
removable drives showing up.  Perhaps some organization is going to be
needed soon with this view...

Under duress,
~ Bryan