Unmounting removable media under Gnome

[Steve Hill]

On Wed, 6 Jun 2007, David Zeuthen wrote:

>> If there's an explicit unmount option then compatibility is maintained
>> and everyone's happy.
>
> Has nothing to do with compatibility. Applications simply need to
> properly deal with hardware and not punt it to the user to tweak the
> hardware so it's in a state acceptable for the program.

It certainly is to do with compatibility - up until recently (the last 
couple of years) it was certainly unusual to have the media mounted when 
you weren't actually using it so it was expected that the media wouldn't 
be mounted if you were trying to erase it, for example.

Over the past couple of years we have had a quite radical shift in the way 
a lot of stuff works under Linux and one of these changes is that media is 
often mounted as soon as it is loaded into the machine, so the expectation 
that it will be unmounted when not in use is nolonger reasonable.

However, it takes a while for software to catch up with this shift - there 
needs to be some (reasonably long) cross-over period where both 
methodologies are accepted.  We can't just suddenly say one day "we've 
decided to change the way stuff works - all your old software will break 
and you'll have to modify it to deal with our new grand design"

For me, part of the point of Linux is that I get a choice over what 
software I use, and it all more or less works together - if I choose a 
particular desktop environment that shouldn't prevent me from effectively 
using software that isn't explicitly integrated into that environment.

Yes, it'd be nice if all the software dealt with the system being in 
whatever unexpected state another piece of software put it in.  But the 
fact is that many pieces of software don't cope well with this kind of 
thing and ignoring the problem and saying "well they should" isn't 
helpful.

-- 

  - Steve
    xmpp:steve at nexusuk.org   sip:steve at nexusuk.org   http://www.nexusuk.org/

      Servatis a periculum, servatis a maleficum - Whisper, Evanescence