New standard proposal

[Alexander Larsson]

On Fri, 2003-09-26 at 12:46, Carlos Perelló Marín wrote:
> El vie, 26-09-2003 a las 10:25, Alexander Larsson escribió:
> > 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...)
> > 
> > Some random comments:
> > 
> > /Volumes is totally non-standard and untypical of unix. Lots of people
> > will not like it. (Not saying I dislike it, personally I don't care,
> > because i don't expect to expose the mountpoint in the UI.)
> > 
> 
> I know, that's why I said that all things could be changed, I like it
> but I suppose that we will ending with /mnt or /vol but that directory
> is for applications that will not work directly with the daemon, it's a
> way to let users find their volumes easily.

For console users you mean? For the UI mounted volumes will show up in
other places that mean you don't have to traverse the filesystem.

> > Mounting things as the volume name seems quite bad to me. That means its
> > hard to figure out what device is actually used for the volume, and if a
> > user inserts an unknown disc it could be hard to figure out where it
> > appears. (Again, i don't expect to show the mountpoint names as-is in
> > the UI.)
> 
> Hmmm, The idea of volume name as mount point is a way to follow the
> volume names in the desktop, when you insert a CD, Nautilus shows a
> CDROM icon with the label as its name. If you connect an external hard
> disk, it's easily detect it as its label instead of something like
> /dev/sda1, also, the external drivers does not use always the same
> device, just play with two USB storages and you will see it.

We already do this, the name shown on the icon isn't related to the
mountpoint name.

> The idea with unknown discs is use a standard name, somethig like
> "Unknown", or it's media type (cdrom0, cdrom1, usb1, usb2, etc..) if you
> use always the same pattern name and document it, it's easy to find it.

We do this too.
 
> > When someone wants to unmount I think we should send out a pre-unmount
> > message so that people having e.g. fam monitors on the volume can
> > release them, since they would otherwise block the unmount/eject.
> 
> Yes, good point :-P
> 
> But then, should we wait for applications replies?, as a confirmation
> that they did release the volume? I suppose that we should, but with a
> timeout and then just try to unmount it.

Yeah, this does get complicated, since you have to wait some time for
the app to actually release its monitors etc. It can't be perfect, but
hopefully better than nothing.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
 Alexander Larsson                                            Red Hat, Inc 
                   alexl at redhat.com    alla at lysator.liu.se 
He's an otherworldly voodoo dwarf with no name. She's an artistic winged widow 
with a birthmark shaped like Liberty's torch. They fight crime!