GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 607600
Make g_unix_mount_guess_type() public
Last modified: 2018-05-24 12:05:45 UTC
In Zeitgeist we need to store which "type" of storage medium a given file was on when you used it - so one can show dialogs like: In order to open foobar.jpg please insert the CD "The Fooest of Bars" Without knowing the storage type it would be s/CD/volume making the dialog a bit weird. One would need to make the GUnixMountType enumeration public too of course. It doesn't seem like a big task because all the methods+enums are documented already. Relevant Zeitgeist bug: https://bugs.launchpad.net/zeitgeist/+bug/489194
Created attachment 151876 [details] [review] Initial stab at the bug Here's my initial stab at this. I've moved GUnixMountType into gioenums.h. I am not really sure this is the right thing to do? Maybe the enum should be renamed to just GMountType - or if we really don't want to specify platform independent mount types, then maybe in a separate giounixenums.h, but that would require a bit of build script tweaking to get GType enum generation working.
Note that bug 594649 is related. What you are asking for is a slippery slope though - there are way too many kinds of media / drive / network mounts and I don't really think it's feasible to encode the type in an enumeration. For physical media, for example, there's at least this http://hal.freedesktop.org/docs/DeviceKit-disks/Device.html#Device:drive-media-compatibility many different physical cards - FYI the gnome-disk-utility-based volume monitor in GVfs uses this information to generate the name and icon. Then there's other stuff like eSATA, USB, Firewire, LVM, RAID, sftp://, dav:// etc. to worry about - generating names/icons for devices is very very tricky. Classifying the device is even harder. Anyway, I hope this makes it clear that GUnixMountType definitely isn't the solution for this - nor the right name. The closest thing I can think of is a GVolumeFormFactor enumeration (and g_{drive,volume,mount}_get_form_factor() methods) with UNKNOWN FLOPPY OPTICAL NETWORK CAMERA MEDIA_PLAYER DISK_ENCLOSURE USB_STICK but what about devices that are more than one of these? Not to mention that it's hard to guess if a device connected via USB is a DISK_ENCLOSURE or not. It's a can of worms really. And I really don't want to add API that can't be implemented. Basically, what you are trying to do is really hard and I seriously doubt that telling the user In order to open foobar.jpg please insert the CD "The Fooest of Bars" instead of [CD Icon] In order to open foobar.jpg please insert "The Fooest of Bars" <small>last inserted: about two weeks ago</small> is going to add a lot of value. E.g. the identifiers you should save for the origin of the file should just be g_mount_get_uuid(), g_mount_get_name() and g_mount_get_icon() and, I guess, the time stamp. I would suggesting closing this as WONTFIX.
I can appreciate your concerns. A full classification of all media types is not gonna fly. However, what we need in Zeitgeist, and I expect a few other apps as well, will not be a fine grained understanding of the devices - the form factor enumeration you suggest would do fine. We will of course use icons in the dialog (making me think that we'd need a get_icon_for_form_factor()-like method as well). However solely relying on the icons will not be accesible I assume (unless stock icons are somehow represented in the a11y layer)? Not being able to guess the form factor would also mean that we couldn't log events about insertions/removals of media in Zeitgeist. Which is of course not a paramount feature, but could be a nice thing to do.
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