[Thunar-dev] Unmount removable devices systemtray app

[Brian J. Tarricone]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: RIPEMD160

Harold Aling wrote:

> When I copy something to my USB flash disk, I now have to either type
> 'sync' in a terminal or right-click a removable device in Thunar and
> select 'eject'.
> 
> Wouldn't it be nice to have a system tray icon present if one or more
> removable devices have been mounted that has these features:
> - Either right or left click shows all mounted removable devices.
> Clicking them syncs and unmounts that specific drive and gives visual
> feedback that it's safe to remove the device.
> - Produce an error popup (which disappears in X seconds) when a user
> does not correctly unmount a removable device before removing it (which
> can lead to data corruption...)

Yep, I completely agree.  I noticed this myself recently on my laptop.
Having to open up a thunar window just to eject a flash drive is annoying.

> - Default action when clicking the systrayicon: 'sync all buffers to disk'

I don't think this last bit is necessary, and calling sync() or fsync()
doesn't necessarily flush dirty buffers to disk (at least on Linux).
Actually, on Linux, there's no way (AFAIK) to guarantee from userspace
that buffers are flushed to disk.  (Not to mention the HW on-disk
buffer, which may not have been flushed.)  So basically this feature is
at best misleading.  The only way to really ensure that data gets
flushed at least out to the hardware is to unmount/eject the volume.

But yeah...  status icon = good idea.

	-brian


-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.3 (GNU/Linux)

iD8DBQFFwjv76XyW6VEeAnsRA0iqAKDMApqXNyF432UncC8/0LXkvMbZbACfcszC
7tnoXYqOefmHN2GhLSrEZFE=
=3988
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----