Re: [rox-devel] Re: Thoughts about HAL, Ivman and Pmount.

[Sabin I. <ia...@gm...>]

On 11/1/05, Tony Houghton <h...@re...> wrote:
> In <200...@ho...>, Jonatan Liljedahl wrote:
>
> > On Mon, 31 Oct 2005 16:56:57 +0100
> > Sabin Iacob <ia...@gm...> wrote:
> >
> > > there can be dozens of volume managers in different colours and
> > > shapes, but they need to have a standard way of signaling (that is,
> > > standard set of signals) something has been done;
>
> [Snip]
>
> > > About the signaling standard, I remember that a while ago I was
> > > reading about the KDE and GNOME teams starting to discuss something
> > > similar, but I know nothing about the outcome. If they didn't get to
> > > any conclusion, who knows, maybe the volume manager signaling
> > > standardisation initiative can come from ROX ;-), and if they adopted
> > > some common standard, it would be good to support it, for
> > > multi-user&desktop friendliness.
> >
> > What would be the sort of signals? Like "A mountpoint was created THERE
> > for device THAT" and "device THAT was mounted on mountpoint THERE",
> > etc...
>
> Isn't it the intention that dbus will be used for that sort of thing?
> ROX-Session already supports dbus, so Thomas (and some other ROX
> developers) are already reasonably familiar with it.

dbus is the way to go, of course, as it is supported by the most
important desktops, but we need a "standard" set of signals, like
"MountPointCreated" and "MountPointRemoved", sending the path and HAL
udi as additional information (maybe the mount/unmount program, too);
then, userspace volume managers listen to these signals and do
whatever they need to do: pop up icons, automount things if the user
wants so, pop up filer windows with that mountpoint, etc.

This way, the userspace part and the system part are independent, as
they should be, other desktops can build clients for the system volume
manager, other people can build system volume managers that satisfy
their needs (or just because they can ;-)), and existing clients can
work with them, since they speak a common language.

--
"Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to
build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying
to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning."
-- Rich Cook