[udisks] Broken floppy support

[Balló György]

Hi,

2011/9/29 David Zeuthen <zeuthen at gmail.com>:
> 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
>

Thank you for your response.

I can sill mount floppies with 'udisks --mount /dev/fd0' command. The
problem is that I think, Nautilus try to probe floppy disks before
mount, but it always gets FALSE even if floppy is available. It
happens since the long hang fix. The proposed patch would solve this
problem by reporting always TRUE, and not against the long hang fix.
Do you think that always report FALSE is the correct behavior, and it
should be fixed somewhere in GNOME?


Thanks,
György Balló