udisks and eSATA: a question about the meaning of "detachable"

[David Zeuthen]

Hi

On Mon, Jul 11, 2011 at 9:25 AM, Tom Gundersen <teg at jklm.no> wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 11, 2011 at 12:58 AM, Ansgar Burchardt <ansgar at debian.org> wrote:
>> I reported a bug in KDE [1] about eSATA drives not being seen as a

The problem with eSATA, in a nutshell, is that there is no reliable
way of figuring out if a device is connected via eSATA. Heck, the
Linux interfaces even make it hard to figure out if a device is
connected via a SATA adapter since it's fine to use SATA devices in a
huge SAS-based SAN w/ multiple initiators. And we really want to avoid
guessing.

>> "removable" device (in KDE's device manager).  I believe this is a bug
>> in KDE's solid as they do not use the correct properties from udisks,
>> however they disagree.
>
> This was discussed on the list recently, e.g.:
> <http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/devkit-devel/2011-June/001098.html>.

Yeah, this is accurate. However note that we still want to treat
devices differently (based on properties like bus type) because we
want automounting to work yet at the same time we don't want to
automount _every_ block device that has a mountable filesystem on it.
This commit

 http://git.gnome.org/browse/gvfs/commit/?id=a342316cb7b9d236ff3063d7b24b7b04c61a379e

explains the problem in detail and why we are being so careful.

Note that this is now controllable via the UDISKS_AUTOMOUNT_HINT property, see

 http://cgit.freedesktop.org/udisks/commit/?id=858adbac9dce63da52764b2d2157bc7782b304a5

so enthusiasts and distros can set this at will for devices they know
are eSATA or whatever. It should be honored by the GVfs shipped with
GNOME 3.2.

    David