[udisks] Broken floppy support

[Martin Pitt]

Balló György [2011-09-29 17:19 +0200]:
> 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?

Returning FALSE is not exactly "correct". It's a stopgap measure for
the common case that floppy controllers behave really nasty when there
is no floppy behind it, and this kind of problem just springs up
everywhere; I fixed it in about three different places now, in our
installer, live system construction package (FYI, casper), and of
course also GNOME. There are also special cases for that in udev
rules.

So effectively disabling floppies in udisks mostly prevents the upper
layers from having to introduce all these "is this a floppy?  oh, then
let's not touch it" game all by themselves.

I'm afraid that with the proposed patch which always claims to have a
medium without probing we'd just get the same problems all over again,
and cause minute long freezes in nautilus, XFCE, and whatnot.

I do agree that the automatic unmount of floppies after manual
mounting is a bug, and fixing that should be fine. I'm happy to review
a patch if someone wants to work on one.

However, I must admit that I personally lost interest in floppies
about ten years ago when I dumped the last computer which had a drive.
Since then I already spent way too much time fixing computers which do
not have a floppy drive, so anything which enables floppies "more"
will cause more work for fixing computers which don't have one, so
please understand that I'm not particularly keen on working on this.
This might sound blunt, and I realize that this effectively condems
Linux to be broken for floppies (at least for standard desktop
installs with udisks and the like), but I'm afraid it's the current
unfortunate reality :(

Thanks,

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