file system mount

[David Zeuthen]

On Fri, 2007-11-02 at 15:18 -0400, David Zeuthen wrote:
> On Fri, 2007-11-02 at 14:16 -0500, Les Mikesell wrote:
> > David Zeuthen wrote:
> > > 
> > > [1] : We could be more creative and try to guess what the file system is
> > > used for; e.g. look for /etc/fedora-release, /etc/debian_release and so
> > > forth (including trying to guess if it's Windows XP, Mac OS X or
> > > whatever). So instead of showing "/" we could show "Fedora Core 7
> > > (Moonshine)". That approach has it's ups and downs (guess is dangerous)
> > > thus why it's not implemented at this point.
> > 
> > How about giving a hint as to which _physical_ disk it is?  Imagine you 
> > had a couple of scsi controllers each with a bunch of disks, plus some 
> > sata and USB volumes and you add one (which might currently have labels 
> > that match other drives) and want to format it.  Which one is it?  Or a 
> > drive in the system fails and isn't detected.  How do you find which one
> > it was?
> 
> You mean like showing "/ (/dev/sdb1)" instead of "/"? It's doable..
> Might make sense in some cases. FWIW, I'm (or alexl) is going to revisit
> most of this before F9 as part of the gio/gvfs hacking. Stay tuned!

Also, just wanted to add, this discussion is mostly about what we use as
names _on the desktop_. Still, your request is valid; if we have a bunch
of similarly named drives then, sure, we should add the device name or
other unique identifier.

However, things like formatting drives, partitioning, setting up LVM and
RAID are most likely going to happen from a dedicated UI that will
display more relevant stuff. I was kinda working on this a while back;
here are some screenshots

 http://people.freedesktop.org/~david/gnome-disk-utility.png
 http://people.freedesktop.org/~david/hal-md-normal.png
 http://people.freedesktop.org/~david/hal-md-degraded.png
 http://people.freedesktop.org/~david/hal-md-recover.png

but then other things became important. Hopefully for F10 we can have
something like this... But now we're drifting off-topic :-)

     David