[udisks] Broken floppy support

[David Zeuthen]

Hi,

On Thu, Sep 29, 2011 at 9:22 AM, Balló György <ballogyor at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi devs,
>
> could someone take care about this one year old bug?
> https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=30283
>
> I think that the previously applied "Fix long hangs on probing
> nonexistant floppy drives" patch[1] causes that probing floppy always
> return FALSE. This causes that it's impossible to mount floppy disks
> with gvfs (and any applications that use gvfs, like Nautilus). To
> solve this problem, a patch[2] was proposed in the bug report, which
> causes that probing floppy always return TRUE. Could someone review
> and apply this patch?

There's always been a lot of problems supporting PC Floppy drives
because of the fact that we cannot poll the media for changes every
two secs like other media. In the past we've tried pretty hard to
support it, even to the point that we modified applications to poll
for media changes, e.g. we actually added a lot of API such as

 http://developer.gnome.org/gio/unstable/GDrive.html#g-drive-is-media-check-automatic
 http://developer.gnome.org/gio/unstable/GDrive.html#g-drive-poll-for-media

which was used in the Nautilus File Manager in response to user input.
Guess what? We still didn't get it right or if we did, it broke a
release later because no-one was actually using this kind of hardware.

My view is now this: I think it's easiest to just not support this
kind of hardware at all and just tell people to just use USB floppy
drives (these can be polled, in fact) for the rare cases they use
floppy media. Or, if that's not possible, these users can manually
mount the device.

Martin, who did the commit, rightfully states

  A lot of modern machines do not have a floppy drive any more, but still
  have a floppy controller somewhere (or at least the BIOS pretends to).
  Trying to open(/dev/fd0) on these machines causes long hangs, which
  lead to long desktop startup times."

meaning that we were even penalizing the common case (no PC floppy
drive) to support an increasingly uncommon case.

    David