[Thunar-dev] Eject and ipods

[Brian J. Tarricone]

On Fri, 23 Feb 2007 23:24:52 +1100 Simon Naunton wrote:

>Looking through the thunar code, whether a removeable drive is
>ejectable or not seems to be based on whether or not it is a "disc"
>(i.e. optical media) , not via storage.requires_eject from HAL as I
>would have expected.
>
>The problem (for me anyway) is that ipods *need* to be ejected

Actually, they don't.  Simply unmounting the filesystem is perfectly
fine (and safe).  The iPod itself still saying 'Do not disconnect' is
not relevant.  I'm not sure why Apple decided to make the device think
it needs a full bus eject, as it's not required.

Note that you can eject most flash-based USB storage as well, and it
will actually tell the USB driver to stop making the device available
to userspace.

Personally, I think 'eject' should be preferred over 'unmount' whenever
eject is supported (at least in a so-called easy-to-use friendly file
manager), but that's just me.  Of course, for media that has more than
one partition, sometimes 'unmount' might be preferred.  For normal use
by your average user, though, 'eject' should make the most sense (and
advanced users who want to do weird things always have the command line
at their disposal).

	-brian