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List:       kde-panel-devel
Subject:    Status of encrypted devices in Plasma / Solid
From:       Jacopo De Simoi <wilderkde () gmail ! com>
Date:       2009-12-07 16:59:32
Message-ID: 200912071800.06140.wilderkde () gmail ! com
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Dear plasma-devs, hardware-devs
 looking forward to check the validity of a bug regarding the device notifier and \
encrypted devices (containers) I noticed several issues with them in the current \
implementation of  the dataengines 
The imporant thing to know about them is that they show up in solid as a \
StorageVolume such that StorageVolume.usage is 'Encrypted'. When they are "mounted"  \
solid asks for a password and if the password is correct, then the partitions which \
are stored inside the device pop up and are correctly collected by the hotplug \
dataengine. Then the user can use them normally; the encrypted device (container) is \
closed (i.e. cannot be used anymore without providing the password again) by \
"unmounting" it.

A few issues arise in this situation:
1) Solid cannot provide us with a signal when an encrypted container is correctly \
"mounted" or "opened" 2) The encrypted containers are currently shown by the \
dataengine since they match the "open with file manager" predicate, however  this \
action does really nothing, since a container simply contains partitions, so we can't \
really open the file manager on unmounted partitions.  Moreover, there is no real \
static action we can associate with them. 3) The user is (imHo) misled by strings \
such as "mount/unmount" and icons such as "mounted/unmounted/eject"

My proposed solutions:
1) A solution (bad, but that's all we can do) to solve issue #1 is to let the hotplug \
engine check if a newly added or removed device is inside an  encrypted container and \
trigger an update of the status of the container accordingly.  If new devices are \
added it means that the container has been opened  if they are removed, it means that \
the container has been closed.  2) Rather than cheating giving a completely fake \
action we could implement an exception for the hotplug engine, letting it populate \
devices with encrypted devices  even if they have no action associated with them.  \
This of course need adjustments to the two (that I know) users of the dataengine \
(device notifier and solid runner)  to make sure they don't assume the existence of \
at least one action and in order for them to properly handle such situation.   A less \
pervasive solution would be to let the engine add dynamic action (open/close the \
container) if it detects an encrypted device. In this case the adjustments to the   \
notifier and to the runner would be less pervasive, but still we need to treat the \
special action in a different way than the others, unless, we rely on \
soliduiserver::showActionsDialog  itself accepting these two as special actions.
3) Nuno already kindly provided emblems/icons for the open/close status \
(locked/unlocked); as for the strings I already asked for an exception for string \
freeze regarding   solid::Device::description() which should say "encrypted \
container" instead of "removable media". I might as well ask for an exception to   \
add "Lock the container" and "unlock the container" if felt needed. If string freeze \
exceptions for these are not granted I'd rather leave descriptions empty rather than  \
providing false information..

Awaiting for your comments and suggestions 
Thanks

 --J
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