Plans for hal 0.5.x

[David Zeuthen]

Hi,

(Cc'ing the gnome-vfs and Nautilus maintainer)

On Mon, 2004-12-13 at 11:05 -0500, John (J5) Palmieri wrote:
> On Sun, 2004-12-12 at 23:05 -0500, David Zeuthen wrote:
> >  2) Finish the gnome-vfs patch (see utopia-list at gnome.org) to a) make
> >     the one-to-many patch work and b) show icons for all drives even
> >     though they don't have media in them. Also make it not rely on the
> >     fstab-sync program.
> 
> I don't want this unless the Nautilus UI changes to support the one-to-
> many model.  Having two or more volumes appear when a user clicks on one
> drive is disorienting.  Also, having more than one volume disappear when
> one volume is unmounted also sucks.  Ideally Nautilus should show
> relationships between the drives and volumes.
> 

Not sure what you mean by your last sentence? Here's what I think it
should look like:

Only CD-ROM drive:

    (icon)         (icon)         (icon)
 CD-ROM drive    Filesystem       Network

Insert 4-in-1 media reader without any media (e.g. no /etc/fstab entries
at all) - I call it Flash! because that's the marketing name :-)

     (icon)         (icon)         (icon)
  CD-ROM drive    Filesystem       Network

     (icon)            (icon)              (icon)           (icon)
  Flash! 4-in-1      Flash! 4-in-1      Flash! 4-in-1    Flash! 4-in-1
  Compact Flash       Memory Stick       Smart Media        SD/MMC

Now insert a CF card with two partitions

     (icon)         (icon)         (icon)
  CD-ROM drive    Filesystem       Network

     (icon)               (icon)
  Flash! 4-in-1        Flash! 4-in-1
  Compact Flash:       Compact Flash:
   vol1_label            vol2_label

     (icon)              (icon)           (icon)
  Flash! 4-in-1       Flash! 4-in-1     Flash! 4-in-1
   Memory Stick        Smart Media        SD/MMC

Not much different from today actually, apart from the fact that the two
CF drive names are named respectively "Flash! 4-in-1 Compact Flash" and
"Flash! 4-in-1 Compact Flash (2)" which is because each of them got a
separate GnomeVFSDrive attached to them. In my view, this work is more
cleaning up the code than cleaning up the UI. Today, it's also pretty
bad that we only get drive icons when there is media in the drives. 

Of course, we may just take the Mac OS X route and not show drives at
all [1] but only show mounted volumes; that would make the UI somewhat
simpler. It also requires automounting but we know, by now, that auto
mounting pretty much works anyway (if it doesn't the entire device
doesn't work!) apart from exceptional conditions.

So, either we should take the Mac OS X route *or* we should always show
all drives (regardless of whether they got an /etc/fstab entry). Today,
it's just a bit confusing.

[1] : except the problematic sucky-hardware ones like floppy and IDE zip
drives but we know how to work around those (hal knows).

> >  4) Make gnome-vfs capable of using libgphoto with URI's
> >     gphoto2:///001/043 (for USB device 43 on USB bus 1). Make hal make
> >     that URI available in computer:/// when we see a libghoto2 supported
> >     camera.
> > 
> 
> I already have code called dphoto from desrt on #gnome-hackers that uses
> a dbus service to marshal access to a device.  It also has a gnome-vfs
> component.  All that is needed is to make the vfs component use the usb
> device and bus identifiers and to make it more robust.
> 

Cool. And make the hal component in gnome-vfs add/remove entries to
computer:/// when hal sees a gphoto2-capable camera I guess? I suspect
this requires some gnome-vfs workarounds, Alex?

Cheers,
David


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