[Thunar-dev] Thunar auto mounting removable devices (a la gnome-volume-manager)

[Erik Harrison]

On 4/26/05, Lucas Meneghel Rodrigues <lookkas at gmail.com> wrote:
> Big Initial Disclaimer: This message is by no means a feature request.
> I want to make clear that I'm not demanding that the developers
> implement any of the ideas exposed on this message. I know that there
> are few developers, with few time, and I do recognize the effort made
> by all of them in delivering xfce for us. Thank you.
> 
> Hi everyone
> 
> I would like to know if the initial plans for thunar include support
> for mounting and displaying removable devices (as nautilus +
> gnome-volume-manager does).

Displaying removable devices is probably the best bet. Managing
mounting is already distro/OS specific, and Xfce is very portable.
Letting the tools provided (like, say, Supermount in Mandrake) and
simply making it easy to access mounted volumes is probably
sufficient.

> 
> I know that coding both infrastructure and UI for this feature would
> be hard, but it may worth the effort, as it would be really useful for
> most users, specially those that are not very proficient with
> computers/linux (and it's usually handy for experienced people).
> 
> Main potential issues that would come if this mechanism is implemented
> into Thunar:
> 
> 1 - Resource usage: As I'm not an skilled programmer, I have no idea
> if this can be implemented in a lightweight way, since we would need
> to have a whole stack of services running (hotplug, udev, hal, d-bus,
> daemon, filemanager)  Maybe more experienced developers can comment on
> this.
> 
> 2 - Reliance in linux 2.6 specific behaviour: The stack of
> technologies previously mentioned  (hotplug, udev, hal, d-bus) depends
> heavily on linux 2.6 technology [1], making the solution not widely
> portable across free unix-like systems (freeBSD, solaris, you name it)
> but it can be made in such a way that the service quits cleanly when
> it doesn't have the needed infrastructure running.
> 
> 3 - Complexity: The developers may consider this way too complex for a
> simple file manager, and not worthy at all: while this would be ok,
> it's interesting to note that interacting with external media
> (cd-roms, video and data dvds) and devices (pen drives, digital
> cameras) plays a central role in most users experience. Making the
> users free from manual tasks usually needed for using this devices
> improves greatly the desktop experience. And, if we can do this with
> fair resource usage, it would rock!
> 
> I would like to hear opinions about this idea . Let's make a good discussion.
> 
> Thanks for your attention
> 
> Lucas
> 
> [1] Obviously not all components mentioned demands linux 2.6, but you
> got the idea.
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-Erik