Hal and fuse filesystem support

Martin Pitt martin at piware.de
Fri Oct 6 06:53:04 PDT 2006


Hi David,

David Zeuthen [2006-10-06  8:25 -0400]:
> It is true that some devices such as iPod's and some other music players
> should be issued the eject command. We match for this and sets the
> storage.requires_eject property and client apps, such as gnome-vfs, can
> do the right thing
> 
>  http://gitweb.freedesktop.org/?p=hal.git;a=blob;hb=HEAD;f=fdi/information/10freedesktop/10-usb-music-players.fdi

Nice, but that's limited to a subset of music players only. Why it's
such a bad thing to power off other devices, too?

>  1. mask the problem - e.g. by ejecting everything, which is wrong, we
>     miss valuable bug reports on what to actually eject; and

As I already explained, this particular problem does not happen in the
default configuration; we do not eject all devices (like NTFS volumes
on your hard disk or fuse mounts), only removable ones.

>  2. fundamentally changes how Ubuntu works compared to other
>     distributions - e.g. unmounting a device makes all the partitions go
>     away (that's the semantics of eject) 

Indeed we had complaints that in order to remove an USB hard disk you
had to unmount all partitions instead of just 'removing the device' in
the UI. Ejecting does exactly this as a side-effect, that's another
reason why we do that (i. e. we consider that a feature, not a bug).

> and this will break partitioning tools that use e.g. gnome-vfs to
> unmount the device.

We currently do not support any partitioning tool that does that. Once
we do, we have to think about it again, of course.

>     Pretty sure it's weird for users too. Users should except to be able
>     to mount a device after they've unmounted it. They can't do this if
>     you eject the device because the partitions go away.

(1) That works fine with my USB stick and USB hard disk. However,
    that's not the case on all types of hardware, sometimes the
    devices indeed disappear and are not mountable any more.
(2) It's not the most common use case to unmount a removable disk and
    to immediately mount it again. Usually you unmount it because you
    want to remove it.

Thank you, and have a nice weekend,

Martin

-- 
Martin Pitt        http://www.piware.de
Ubuntu Developer   http://www.ubuntu.com
Debian Developer   http://www.debian.org

In a world without walls and fences, who needs Windows and Gates?
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: Digital signature
Url : http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/hal/attachments/20061006/4f6ba13c/attachment.pgp


More information about the hal mailing list