[Thunar-dev] thunar-volman

Benedikt Meurer benedikt.meurer at unix-ag.uni-siegen.de
Fri Jan 12 00:29:56 CET 2007


For the brave: I've just imported an initial version of the
thunar-volman, which provides automatic handling of removable drives and
media for Thunar. This requires a really recent version of Thunar.

It's designed to look and behave similar to gnome-volume-manager, tho of
course, it's not bug-compatible. ;-)

The difference (advantage) to gnome-volume-manager is that it (a)
doesn't require GNOME and (b) doesn't require an additional daemon. To
avoid the daemon, Thunar was extended to act as a proxy between HAL and
thunar-volman, which means whenever HAL reports a new device,
thunar-volman is invoked to handle it according to it's configuration.
That was pretty simple, because Thunar has to monitor HAL events anyway.
This is of course optional.

Consider thunar-volman experimental. I've tested it with HAL on FreeBSD
and so far that seems to work pretty well.

One problem I noticed however: Our applications (i.e. Xfmedia, Xfburn)
that would be spawned by the volume manager, don't provide the necessary
command line switches (i.e. Xfmedia needs a command line switch to
accept the UDI and/or the device file path of an audio CD). Xfburn on
the other hand should provide options to start compiling an audio or
data CD/DVD, and it would be really nice to drop the Linux code from
Xfburn and do the device lookup using HAL (that would also allow to pass
the HAL UDI of the newly inserted disc). Not high priority, of course, I
just thought I should mention that.

Otherwise, give it a go, if you think it's useful...

 http://svn.xfce.org/svn/goodies/thunar-volman/trunk/

HTH,
Benedikt



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