[Utopia] we need a spec for handling mediums

[Joseph Wenninger]

Hi

On Mon, 2004-08-16 at 16:27, Jerry Haltom wrote:
> > >Just throwing this out there: Mime: x-device/cdrom-audio, x-
> > >device/camera, etc. Applications handle these Mime types just like any
> > >other.
> > >  
> > >
> > 
> > But how do you identify the devive to the application?  Some want the 
> > device path, some want the mount path, some want a HAL id, etc.
> 
> Don't know. ;) Here are some ideas though. Right now, how is the
> determination made whether the app should receive a full file:/// url or
> just a absolute local path? It could be similar.
> 
> Maybe the .desktop file could (and should) have a HotplugExec entry,
> with some substitution such as %d (device path), %u (udi) or %m (mount
> point).
> 
> Maybe there could be a standard format to pass a device specification
> string to an app: $udi,$dev,$mount.
> 
> Of all of them I like the first and second best.

I don't know much about the gnome-vfs system, so I can only say what I
do or plan to do in kde

In kde blockdevices and mediums have urls like devices:/someInternalName
and have a given display name. The current way as is in kde cvs does
only mounting and redirecting if such a icon is clicked to the mounted
device. Each device has a mimetpye like kdedevice/cdrom_(un)mounted,
kdedevice/cdwriter_(un)mounted, ...

What I'm at implementing is that there is a support for additional
mimetypes like kdedevice/cdwriter_emptydisc, ....
My idea, who an application get's to know more about the device, without
the need of accessing the dcop module, which handles the listing in the
background would be that it can do simple get requests to urls like
devices:/devicename?devicenode
devices:/devicename?scsiID
devices:/devicename?halid
devices:/devicename?mountpoint
and gets as a result the requested information as a string back.

If KDE and GNOME would standardize the device slave/vfs name and the
options it would be easy to to execute applications of both desktops and
each applications uses the desktop specific system vfs or kio-slave for
information retrieval. 
For legacy applications it should be easily to use shell scripts for
converting the urls to the possibly not standardized parameter format
needed by them.

Kind regards
Joseph Wenninger