GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 660803
"Software" option doesn't work.
Last modified: 2021-06-09 16:09:29 UTC
No matter what option I select for Software in the Removable Media settings, I always get a shell message asking me what to do, and the options are always "Open with Autorun Prompt", and "Eject". Three things: 1) Should "Open with Autorun Prompt" (or better language) be in the drop-down list of what I can choose to do? It's not currently. Maybe that's by design. 2) The message should really only be shown if I selected "Ask what to do". If I selected "Open folder", I'd kind of like the folder to be opened in Nautilus. 3) The message never offers "Open folder" or "Open in Files" or whatever. It really should. I'm not positive this is a control-center bug. It might be that parts are and parts aren't.
I have no idea how the shell autorun prompts are supposed to interact with those settings.
How are we currently defining autorun media? What is an example of one that work in GNOME?
(In reply to comment #2) > How are we currently defining autorun media? What is an example of one that > work in GNOME? Any media with a .autorun file, or autorun.sh at the root should do. The format is that of an auto-start desktop file: http://standards.freedesktop.org/autostart-spec/autostart-spec-latest.html
shared-mime-info defines x-content/unix-software as a volume with any of ".autorun", "autorun", or "autorun.sh" in the root. It also defines x-content/win32-software as a volume with either of "autorun.exe" or "autorun.inf" in the root. Both are subtypes of x-content/software. I'm not sure if we're matching on x-content/unix-software or x-content/software for the messages.
What is an example of something that uses this? I'm guessing that most of the time there isn't an "app" that runs but just some script? It seems to me to be a little sketchy to run apps or scripts off removable media before they are installed/trusted.
I have no idea what people use this for. The help text that was already there gave a slideshow as an example, but I don't know if anybody does that. Of course, it's very common in Windows for software installer CDs to do this. And of course, that's how Sony gets root kits onto Windows computers. Personally, I'd remove the option, always prompt, and offer "Open in Files" in the prompt. I don't feel strongly about what the correct behavior is, but the current behavior doesn't work as advertised.
Okay, I pushed a trivial fix to gnome-control-center master and gnome-3-2 for the immediate bug (exposed options not working as expected). It was a mismatch between the mimetype the software autorun handler (Autorun Prompt) claims (x-content/unix-software) and the content type the panel was trying to match (the generic x-content/software). (Pushed also the change to the default value of org.gnome.desktop.media-handling.autorun-x-content-start-app in gsettings-desktop-schemas master, probably not worth it to fix in gnome-3-2 as well there?) So, the intended default behaviour is we automatically start the software autorun handler (at the moment shipped with Nautilus), which will spawn a GTK dialog asking confirmation before starting the autorun script. Putting things in another perspective, I don't particularly like that combobox either, but I heard this is an useful feature e.g. in enterprise environments to kick off an add-on media support bundled with the OS, so I still think we should support it. Maybe it would be nice to move that software autorun handler somewhere else though? Should we leave this bug open for further ideas?
Note that we also need this [1] fix on the shell side. [1] https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=660821
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