GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 156018
gnome-vfs-volume-monitor hal backend ignores fstab nfs volumes
Last modified: 2005-01-14 02:49:41 UTC
When the hal backend (USE_HAL) is enabled, nfs (and other) network drives are not listed in gnome_vfs_volume_monitor_get_mounted_volumes(). This is a problem, in particular as nautilus uses gnome_vfs_volume_monitor_get_mounted_volumes() to determine where to search for .Trash folders, so if /home is NFS (fairly common setup) then the user's trash folder will appear empty as the entries in ~/.Trash will not be merged into trash:///. The problem appears to be that when hal is enabled, gnome-vfs-volume-monitor-daemon assumes that drives are either physical (and so handled by hal) or "Connect to Server" drives. Network mounts are neither, so they are forgotten about. (e.g. gnome-vfs-volume-monitor-daemon.c:188) (When hal is disabled, NFS mounts are seen by update_mtab_volumes().) I think the code would need to check mtab for non-physical mounts into the UNIX filesystem heirarchy, or (equally) check that everything in mtab gets seen one way or the other. Proof: moving update_mtab_volumes() out of the if (dont_use_hald) section, thus ensuring it is always encountered, makes gnome_vfs_volume_monitor_get_mounted_volumes() return /home in the list and populates trash:/// correctly. Of course, this probably breaks something else. Marking normal because although this breaks nautilus, the hal backend is not enabled by default; it has to be enabled with --enable-hal. Would become major if hal backend became default or widely shipped.
Having thought about this a bit, I think bug 154135 is related. For a standalone system, which connects to network resources on a per-user basis only, the current halified behaviour of listing physical volumes and "Connect to Server" mounts is probably OK. However on a machine in a networked environment, with system-level network resource connections, this is not acceptable; halification can augment the lists from fstab and mtab but cannot replace them; gnome-vfs-volume-monitor should get drives from both hal and fstab/mtab, and then weed out duplicates.
This is a known problem with the current HAL support. Its even in NEWS: gnome-vfs 2.7.92 Note: The HAL support (which is disabled by default) has some known issues where it doesn't detecte volumes for all mounted filesystems. This is known to cause some problems with for instance trash handling. There was a hal-support rewrite posted on the list recently that fixes this, but its not in yet, pending some small changes.
Can this be marked as fixed now that this rewrite has been commited ?
Yep.