[Thunar-dev] "Ejecting" USB flash drives

[Jannis Pohlmann]

Hey,

On Wed, 23 Feb 2011 16:23:40 +0100
Harald Judt <h.judt at gmx.at> wrote:

> Anyway, I've patched thunar to reactivate the unmount action for both 
> the tree view and the shortcut view. As most of the code is already
> in place, this was not very difficult, I just had to do a little copy
> & paste here and there. It adds another entry to the context menu,
> but does not remove the eject entry. While it's just a hack,
> duplicates some code, contains unnecessary checks or misses some and
> therefore is certainly improvable, I'll still attach it to the mail
> for those who are interested.

the reason for removing the the unmount option was to make things
easier for people. Nobody should have to understand what unmounting is
and how it differs from ejecting.

You attach (mount) your drive and you detach (eject) it and that's it.
Keeping a device around after unmounting it just to be able to mount it
again later makes no sense IMHO. Please show me a valid use case where
this is important and I might rethink my perspective. I can only think
of "oops, I forgot to copy this file to the USB stick, now I need to
mount it again" so far.

Please note that we don't always eject. If the device doesn't support
ejecting then we just umount (we still call it eject in the GUI to
avoid confusion regarding unmount vs. eject). So if GIO told us that
e.g. USB sticks cannot be ejected, then we would only unmount it. (And
yes, we could also try to power it down if no partitions on the device
are being used.)

I am against bringing back umount + eject and I favor eject only. If
GIO provides us with wrong information however there's little we can do.

  - Jannis