Re: [Gap-dev-discuss] hot plug storage

[Riccardo Mottola]

Hi Heikki,

sorry for the late reply - I collected some information for you though.

Heikki Lindholm wrote:
> Hello list,
>
> After over a decade of not having used it, I decided to see how would 
> GNUstep suit one's desktop needs these days. So I quickly set it up 
> from FreeBSD ports (WDM, WindowMaker, all the GNUStep ports I could 
> find). As a desktop system, I'm seeing quite a few omissions compared 
> to recent GNOME or others.

Good to see somebody interested!
Sure there are a lot of omissions. Most of them are because the feature, 
tool or program was not written yet. Some of them may be intentional: if 
we add everything like GNOME, we get big, bloated and unportable like 
GNOME. I take pride that I can run most of GAP and GS  on a Solaris 
server and work remotely!
GAP itself tries to cater many applications which enhance GNUstep. Some 
of the features you need however might be implemented in GNUstep itself.
Etoilé is instead another dekstop project which is perhaps more 
comprehensive and radical than GAP.
I wish that in GAP you can cherry-pick several applicartions.without the 
need to isntall the "whole lot".

> I'll start off with one of the most basic ones that comes to mind: 
> (USB / CD-ROM) storage hot plugging and automounting as implemented on 
> other desktops via udisks, hal, thunar-volman, etc. Is there anything 
> like that in GNUstep or GAP or GWorkspace? The most natural way of 
> implementing it would seem to be wrapping udisks/hal inside a copy of 
> Apple's DiskArbitration API.
>
> I haven't yet checked out the latest source code, or verified how old 
> the versions FreeBSD ports provides are, so maybe many of the 
> omissions I see are not relevant anymore, or implemented somewhere 
> else, such as Etoile(?)

Currently, I do not know of any automount features - I (actually I may 
say "we") that GNUstep, GWorkspace and GAP remain as portable as 
possible and do not have hard dependencies on specifically HAL or DBUS, 
which are full of issues and which may exist on Linux and not on BSD or 
Solaris or Windows... howevre optionally supporting is of course fine.

There are several "pointers" where to do work.
I have worked to improve volume mounting in GWorkspace - but it is on 
request ("check disks") which I prefer anyway. It will currently mount 
known stuff from fstab and which you can configure using the specific 
SystemPreferences panel.
Volume features should integrate well with the APIs which report mounted 
volumes.

I generalized work from GWorkspace and enhanced the NSWorkspace class, 
so this work is available in GNUstep core. It is able now to mount 
volumes on most Linux and BSD system I could work on.

Thus for your work you should look at GNUstep itself and GWorkspace.

I guess thus that DiskArbitration might be a gnustep library to provide, 
you could discuss that directly on the GNUstep lists.
Also, in GNUstep there is the optional dbus-kit which might help you.

for missing application and tools however, this is the correct place to 
discuss things.

have nice coding!

Riccardo