New standard proposal

[David Zeuthen]

On Fri, 2003-09-26 at 02:19, Carlos 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 will use D-BUS as the IPC between the server and the clients
> (Nautilus, Konqueror, etc...)
> 

Hi Carlos,

This is part of what I'm trying to achieve with the HAL project[1] - see
e.g. the use-case for hot plugging USB storage in the HAL draft spec. 

What your spec covers, and I have yet not covered, is media detection on
e.g. optical drivers. I think, in the HAL project, this can be
implemented as a tiny daemon (or plug-in to hald) for kernels that
doesn't support notifications of this sort. (this is somewhat similar to
the thread about link detection on network devices)

Also, I understand that it is difficult, if not impossible [2], to find
out the device for e.g. usb-storage devices (e.g. /dev/sda1 is the SCSI
block device representing my USB CF Reader on my IDE system) on Linux
kernel 2.4 series. In Linux kernel series 2.6 it will be handled by
udev.
If you have any insight to this (your draft spec mention USB devices)
I'll be happy to know about it.

Regards,
David


[1] : http://hal.freedesktop.org

[2] :
http://www.dragoninc.on.ca/mail-archives/linux-usb/2002-06/0122.html

But, one could parse e.g. /var/log/messages since the kernel logs it
there, but that would be considered evil.