Mounting some volumes can take a long time. For example, mounting LUKS volumes [1] can take up to 10 seconds and connecting to a network share can also take a long time. We really need to show feedback to the user that the operation is pending - right now it looks really weird, you click the LUKS volume in the sidebar and then 10 seconds later the window switches to the mounted filesystem.

The same goes for unmounting a mount - the OS might need to write a lot of buffers to the disk before the filesystem is considered unmounted (bug 579085 is related here).

Thus, it would be useful to show feedback to the user for this. If initiating the mount/unmount operation from within Nautilus itself, the cursor should spin.

Additionally, it would also be nice with a spinner in the sidebar (next to the volume/mount) to show that an operation is pending even when not initiated from Nautilus itself. For this we need GIO changes such as g_[drive|volume|mount]_get_job_is_pending() and possibly _get_job_description() for a tooltip etc. We might even want g_[drive|volume|mount]_cancel_job() so the user has a way of canceling the job from within Nautilus even if it was initiated from some other process (e.g. the file chooser, Palimpsest, whatever).

(Might want to only handle the cursor bits in this bug and move the spinner stuff to a separate bug - I just wanted to brainstorm about the bigger picture)

[1] : actually, "mounting" a LUKS volume means setting up a cleartext device, then mounting the filesystem on the cleartext device