[Xfce-bugs] [Bug 14812] Thunar shows all fstab entries in devices in the Shortcuts Side Pane

[bugzilla-daemon at xfce.org]

https://bugzilla.xfce.org/show_bug.cgi?id=14812

--- Comment #5 from Bakhelit at gmail.com ---
I just done some testing on my current Debian 10 system. The problematic
behavior described in this bug report still occurs with the following package
versions:
  gvfs (1.38.1-5)
  libglib2.0-0 (2.58.3-2+deb10u2)
  thunar (1.8.4-1)

as versions did not change much from those mentioned in comment 3. However,
after removing the following packages:
  gvfs
  gvfs-backends
  gvfs-common
  gvfs-daemons
  gvfs-libs

the problematic behavior can be seen always, even when running Thunar as a
normal (non-root) user. Thus, I can confirm it is definitely a result of
something the gvfs should do (i.e. some filtering of devices) while probably
using some functionality from libglib2? However when running Thunar as root
with gvfs installed the filtering of devices by gvfs seems not to be done
resulting in the problematic behavior.

If someone qualified can confirm that Thunar does use gvfs identically no
matter under which user Thunar is run, then the problem should be in gvfs and
we can try to report it as a gvfs bug. But I also found the following link
"https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/gvfs/doc" with a FAQ that discusses "Running
applications under root". It seems to suggest that gvfs does not work well when
used by an application run by root in a normal non-root session. I use the
"Exec=pkexec /usr/bin/thunar /" command in a "*.desktop" file to start Thunar
as root, thus I am not 100% sure the FAQ applies to my case, but it seems
likely. This could also mean that if Thunar indeed uses gvfs when run by root
it may be doing a wrong thing in the first place?

Since I use Thunar as root only for specific tasks like moving or deleting
system configurations etc. I am not going to run whole XFCE session as root
just to get a consistent and nice filtering of DEVICES section. Besides that
would be wrong security-wise:). But it would be nice if Thunar would not depend
on gvfs for the filtering of DEVICES section. Then I could improve my system in
the future by purging gvfs with its bunch of dependency packages and try to
find an alternative to it (i.e. could systemd automount be used instead of
gvfs?).

In the mean time Thunar could be improved by adding a configuration option to
hide the DEVICES section from the Shortcuts Side Pane. This option could
perhaps be active by default when Thunar is run by root. Reasons are:

- Information from the gvfs FAQ "Running applications under root".

- The DEVICES section in root Thunar is more or less broken as it shows
confusing and redundant devices + I also noticed that it does not show new
connected devices such as USB disks (only after the device is mounted in a
non-root Thunar it appears in the root Thunar).

- The DEVICES section is redundant in root Thunar as one can deal with DEVICES
in standard non-root Thunar.

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