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List:       kde-devel
Subject:    Re: Against the system:/, media:/ and home:/ namespaces
From:       Luke Sandell <kdedevel () luketopia ! net>
Date:       2005-07-10 20:22:17
Message-ID: 200507102022.17489.kdedevel () luketopia ! net
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On Wednesday, July 6, 2005 1:20 am, Manuel Amador wrote:
> Is it just me, or someone else in this mailing is feeling a little
> uneasy with the direction Konqueror/KIO is taking?

Yes.

> Why the hell are we moving away from standard UNIX paths, and inventing
> another arcane proprietary path/resource location system?

Because the UNIX filesystem is incomprehensible to the average user. No casual 
user is ever going to understand the idea of a single root directory, or the 
concept of "mounting" filesystems. Unfortunately, Windows-style drive letters 
and synchronous access (that actually works) are probably not going to be 
introduced on UNIX anytime soon, and so there is no way to solve this except 
abstracting it away. 

The organization of the UNIX filesystem is not really much of an issue, 
because users generally only care about browsing files in their home 
directory. That is why the Home Folder entries were introduced in the 
Konqueror sidepane and in the file selection dialog. I would support home:/ 
if it made sense. Unfortunately, to access my home directory, I would have to 
type home:/luke instead of /home/luke, not much of an improvement. Simply 
home:/ would make sense.

UNIX will never be a feasible desktop OS until mounting is completely hidden 
and transparent to the user. My biggest problem with media:/ is as follows: A 
devices should be automatically mounted whenever the user tries to access it 
(media:/ has done this) and AUTOMATICALLY UNMOUNTED WHENEVER THE USER IS DONE 
ACCESSING IT (media:/ has not done this). There should then be no overlay on 
device icons indicated whether they are mounted or unmounted, because user's 
don't know about mounting. Of course, this could be done automatically 
through something like subfs, autofs, or supermount, but since those tools 
don't really work and are not widely utilized, media:/ will probably have to 
do this on its own.

Other outstanding issues include

1) mounted filesystems still appear as if they are located on the root device 
(e.g. media:/hd0/media/floppy0 contains the contents of media:/fd0)

2) there is no userspace mounting on Linux, even if the user has ownership of 
the device node, so hot-pluggable devices cannot be utilized except by first 
mounting them as root or setting them up in fstab, which completely defies 
the definition of "hot-pluggable". It is also no possible to mount such 
things as ISO images in userspace, which if were possible could be a great 
feature for KDE.

3) the floppy drive must always appear in media:/ on PC systems, even when no 
disk is present, because there is no way to tell if there is one present. 
Thus, CD-ROMs and other non-hot-pluggable devices should always appear in 
media:/ as well for consistency.

4) it is possible for a PC user to remove a floppy disk before it is 
unmounted.

-- 
Luke Sandell
"Actually, Windows doesn't 'just work' either."
 
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