Re: ANN: GWorkspace 0.6.5

[Frederico Muñoz]

On 2004-06-10 01:21:02 +0100 Fred Kiefer <fredkiefer@gmx.de> wrote:

(snip)
>> And, take a look in Desktop.m; I've a full implementation 
>> of all the NSWorkspace methods that mount and umount volumes; actually it 
>> is a bit too linux-specific but, with some ifdefs in the part that parse 
>> /etc/mtab, I think that could be moved in NSWorkspace.
>> 
> 
> This looks nice, why don't you move it over. The onyl part I don't like about 
> it is the getting of the removable devices from a environmant variable. This 
> looks wrong to me, we should get this from fstab or mtab. My Linux 2.6 has 
> the type "subfs" for these devices.

IIRC sufs is a module spawned from the submount project and allows automatic 
mount/unmount of removable devices. I'm not sure if it's present on stock 2.6 
Linux kernels... last time I looked at it only SuSE shipped with it by default 
by both providing the module and using fstype subfs in the CD/floppy fstab 
entry. In my Debian system with a self compiled kernel I don't have this module 
and I can't find any reference to it in the kernel config file. Submount is a 
bit like supermount I think (Mandrake uses supermount by default, or it used 
to). Since these systems handle mounting by themselves some notification 
mechanism would need to be implemented (or simply mark every subfs entry as 
removable and add a fswatcher to their mount points... I initially did this 
with supermount).


> I cannot remember how 2.4 treated them. 

Without a device automounting there is nothing in fstab to differentiate them 
from "normal" mountpoints, at least nothing solid.

> This solution isn't any more Linux specific than the current one.

Well, the current one can be made to work in just about every other Unix 
(ifdefing /etc/vfstab for Solaris, /etc/filesystems for AIX and in this case 
changing the parsing, etc). I think it should actually work in BSD as it is. 
The supermount/submount are much more Linux specific, but it would indeed be 
great to suport this methods (and other ones, like vold in Solaris). I think 
that the ability to handle removable media in the absence of automounting is 
very important, and the current system makes it pretty simple.

In case of automounting the unmount button in NSOpenPanel ans NSSavePanel (and 
possibly other places) woudl have no effect... I don't know if subfs can 
actually receive a umount.

BTW, if these methods get to NSWorkspace (I hope so) it would be great to 
update those files to support the mount/unmount buttons.

> For 
> something more general we will need to wait for HAL 
> (http://www.freedesktop.org/Software/hal)


I played with the GNOME application that browses HAL... looked very nice, and 
provided all the necessary information and many more. Should definitly be 
supported.


Best regards,

Frederico Muñoz