GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 309067
turn gfloppy into an all-purpose media formatter
Last modified: 2009-11-09 13:35:01 UTC
As the significance of floppies has diminished over the years, gfloppy seems to have fallen a bit behind the times. I'd like to see gfloppy turned into an all-purpose media formatter (not unlike Disk Utility in Mac OS X) that would be able to format not only floppies, but all kinds of removable and nonremovable media, including hard drives, CD/DVD-RWs, USB memory sticks and more.
I agree, being able to format USB keys (and all manner of other media) would be highly useful. I suspect that with HAL enabled gfloppy, this is simply a case of getting all of the useful devices with capabilities storage, block and perhaps either storage.drive_type == floppy or storage.hotpluggable == true. A GNOME Lover could cook this up, so I've marked it as such.
That sounds like fun and I've been looking for a project. I'll try to cook something up.
In fact, since we now have the infrastructure in HAL to allow processes to invoke methods, one idea would be for HAL to offer a FormatVolume() method for existing partitions of a drive and a PartitionDisk() method on drives. Then gfloppy would simply use these. Specifically what parameters these method calls would take needs some thought; what comes to mind would be e.g. Format(string filesystem_type, string label). For PartitionDisk it would be slightly more complicated ;-). These methods don't yet exist but we want to add them at some point. Suggest to mail hal@lists.freedesktop.org if you want to contribute patches for HAL to do this. About privileges, that's a little more difficult. We *could* allow any user at the console (or for Ubuntu / Debian) to format / partition external drives (such as a USB Harddisk Enclosure) and removable media (such as floppy disks and Compact Flash cards) without entering e.g. the root password. Unsure about what to do in the general case. Needs careful consideration with security in mind.
anyone is working on that?
(In reply to comment #4) > anyone is working on that? Yes, see http://www.barisione.org/blog.html/p=65 .
Some times ago I did some research too. Unlikely not much time to go on with the development now. See http://www.rootshell.be/~loopback/gnome-media-formatter/
Any progress here? Seems that it has been removed from gnome-utils!?
(In reply to comment #7) > Any progress here? no. the gnome-format project at: svn://paulbetts.org/gformat stalled its development. > Seems that it has been removed from gnome-utils!? it hasn't been removed: gfloppy has been disabled by default since it's unmaintained.
Can we import that code in GNOME svn? Even if it's not working atm. I mean, the code is GPL/LGPL or the likes? Maybe if someone can blog/post a message in gnome-love or the likes people will show interest in it, and for sure it will be included in 2.26 if it works :)
(In reply to comment #9) > Can we import that code in GNOME svn? Even if it's not working atm. I mean, the > code is GPL/LGPL or the likes? I'm not the author. and ideally, the code should be imported directly into gnome-utils SVN - and I'm not going to use svn:externals or to import a module that's half-finished. > Maybe if someone can blog/post a message in gnome-love or the likes people will > show interest in it, and for sure it will be included in 2.26 if it works :) I seriously doubt it: gfloppy has been in the same state for years, and gnome-format was the result of a call for help I made almost two years ago. gfloppy (like the system log viewer and gnome-screenshot) does not need "drive-by" patches: it needs a maintainer.
Problem is that people assumed to make it and didn't finished it. I bet more people like myself wanted to try but stopped after seeing someone was working on the project.
nobody stopped people from contributing: I know for sure that Luca (comment 6) contributed code to Paul Bett's gnome-format after discovering its existence. as I said, though, gfloppy doesn't need drive-by patches: it needs a full rewrite that is guaranteed to be maintained a year or two from the actual inclusion inside gnome-utils. as a side point: David Zeuthen is working on a replacement for HAL called DeviceKit which will provide access and policy managment (through PolicyKit) for disks: http://hal.freedesktop.org/docs/DeviceKit-disks/ this should be used to creat, manage, erase and format partitions on removable volumes. anyone willing to write a gfloppy replacement should use DeviceKit-disks and PolicyKit.
Any news on this one?
thanks for your bug report. GFloppy has been removed from the GNOME Utilities since the 2.28.0 release, and replaced by the GNOME Disk Utility.