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Re: Windows drives vs POSIX mounts [message #2904 is a reply to message #2877]

Sat, 29 April 2006 14:09

guido
Messages: 169
Registered: April 2006

Experienced Member

luzr wrote on Sat, 29 April 2006 07:52

I am sorry for arguing, perhaps I just do not understand the issue right, but what is wrong with

"FileSel still only show mounts as regular folders"

? I always thought that this is a big advantage of unified posix filesystem?

OK, I am convinced. Anyway, have I got it right that your proposal in fact covers two areas:

- directory icons
- directory history droplist initial content

?

Mirek

/media is for user-mountable devices.

Unified filesystem is about mounting e.g.
/home /var /boot /usr /srv
onto seperate local hd-partitions or a remote resource even - seemlessly, flexible and predictably. This makes it easy for the admin in enterprise environments to partition a system to his liking without the client user noticing a difference.
Also there are other mounts like /dev /proc /sys, possibly /tmp, which like the above shouldn't prominently show up in a file-selector, because they are of no interest to anybody than the system administrator, developers (sometimes) - or your distributor for a home box.

But /media is special. That's the place for removable/hotplugged storage. Or non-system internal disk-partitions, like a partition filled with multimedia files. It should be easily discoverable.
Those places show up on the Nautilus and KDE desktops also, if the distributor has done his job well, at least.
KDE and Gtk file-selectors support even more special locations in the filesystem like $HOME/Desktop. I think this is configurable to some extend though - they use a bookmark system here I think. Probably fairly easy to have FileSel read out the KDE file-selector "bookmarks" - but that's no "must have" I think.

POSIX filesystems are just to arcane and cluttered, due to the convention of installing by filetype (I like to call this "splatter install" Very Happy

), to have non-experts freely navigate outside $HOME, so Linux desktops, notably Nautilus and Konqueror give it a friendlier face with an alternate view. This abstraction above the filesystem has the additional advantage of being easily localizable (avoids the problems MS created for installers by localising "Program Files" directly on the filesystem level).
Gnome/KDE use their VFS layers for this purpose (gnome-vfs, kio respectivly) - but for this purpose alone you don't need a full-blown userland VFS, as you can see. There is effort underway to have - shared by KDE and Gnome - "desktop VFS". If it takes off, upp could use that later on, but who knows if it does take off...
MacOS X can afford to go even further by hiding the POSIX tree alltogether, as there the POSIX tree doesn't hold GUI relevant files like icons, wallpapers, fonts.

Btw:
In my code I added /mnt only for legacy purposes, as it's now supposed to be a system administrator's playground only. It's empty on a home maschine on recent Linuxes normally now. On legacy systems it still has the purpose /media has now.
As the droplist should contain the mounts below /mnt and /media - not those directories as such, it doesn't hurt to have /mnt checked for drives as well.

Yes, drive images, droplist with drives and dotfile support, is what I want. Gnome and KDE users will expect it and else will few upp as inferior.
Personally I think you should make the POSIX file-selector look like KDE's, that would be a strong plus, put it even ahead of plain Qt, as Qt suffers from the same win32 default look&feel problem as upp (and most other toolkits, except wx). toolkit-theme-engines/skins isn't the whole story - which leads me to an additional request:
Would be nice if upp supported XDG compliant icon themes, and apps would use built-in icons only as fallback - and I want a pony Laughing

Would be cool if unmounted drives could be mounted from the fileselector - otherwise there is no point showing them at all.
Omitting unmounted drives or mount'em on double-click - not sure what's better honestly.

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