New standard proposal

[Derek Foreman]

On Fri, 26 Sep 2003, Carlos [ISO-8859-1] Perelló Marín wrote:

> Hi people, I'm working on a system wide Volume Manager (something like
> autorun and magicdev) and I want it as a shared technology between
> GNOME/KDE/Other desktops.
> 
> Here you have the initial draft:
> http://carlos.pemas.net/projects/volume-management-spec/
> 
> There you will see some initial things I have in my mind but they are
> not definitive. I want something that all us could share so I need your
> ideas/suggestions to improve it.

I think it needs some kind of temporary disable option, possibly on a per 
drive basis.

The burning library I'm working on won't use a device if it's mounted, 
so if a user inserts a CDRW with a valid filesystem on it, they won't be 
able to blank it or burn to it until they unmount it.
(insert, unmount, burn.. seems counterintuitive, and I think I'll end up 
fielding thousands of "can't blank CDRW" bug reports :)

Same problem with backing up a disc.  if it's inserted while my program is 
running, it's probably a safe assumption the user doesn't want it 
automounted.

How do you do the automounting with CDs?  some CDROM drives take a few 
seconds to figure out they're empty if you're just polling with mount.  It 
might not be a good idea to manage all cdrom drives in all cases.

If it's polling, then a far more interesting failure mode is a race
between mount and erase on a CDRW.  app opens device, locks drive door,
gives a 5 second warning that all contents will be lost.  automounter
kicks in, mounts the volume, runs an auto run script.  app sends the blank
disc command...