Update on DeviceKit

[David Zeuthen]

On Sun, 2008-06-01 at 13:44 -0700, Vlad wrote:
> There seems to be a lot of redundancy between what GNU Parted/GParted
> already do:
> 
> http://www.gnu.org/software/parted/index.shtml
> http://gparted.sourceforge.net/
> 
> and the features you envision for
> DeviceKit/DeviceKit-disks/gnome-disk-utility.

Not really. First, it's not about "envisioning"; g-d-u/DeviceKit-disks
already has these features. Second, for the record, DeviceKit-disks uses
GNU Parted for partitioning so no wheels are being reinvented here.
Third, the various GNU parted frontends (e.g. gparted, qparted) have the
following shortcomings

 - It's a single process so it runs the UI as uid 0
   - which is bad for so many reasons I'm not going to repeat here

 - Doesn't handle Linux md Software, RAID, doesn't handle S.M.A.R.T.,
   doesn't handle LVM2, doesn't handle LUKS etc... and I could go on

 - AFAIK, is not written in a way such that the UI shell is only 500-100
   lines of code and the rest is in reusable libraries / D-Bus services
   sitting at the right level in the stack

   - For example g-d-u is built from
     - libgdu.so which is at the gtk+ level
     - libgdu-glib.so which is at the glib level
     - DeviceKit-disks which is a system D-Bus service

   - This is useful as
     - gvfs can use libgdu-glib.so for volume monitoring
     - nautilus can use libgdu.so for providing "Format..." and
       "Check File System..." menu options on the context menu
     - trivial to write a small applet telling you when a disk
       is failing or a RAID array gets degraded
     - also trivial to write a system-level daemon to do the same
       and send mail (e.g. for servers)

and so on and so on. Please realize that stuff like partitioning and
formatting a disk is only a minor bit of what DeviceKit-disks g-d-u
does / will do.

      David