DesktopVolumesRepresentation
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The drives and volumes representation has been made consitent over the desktop and their naming has been simplified | The drives and volumes representation has been made consistent over the desktop and their naming has been simplified |
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* No, it wouldn't avoid the problem because multiple installations of Ubuntu on the same machine are not uncommon. There's a limit on label length (ext2 is limited to 16 characters, at least) so there's only so far we can take automatic disambiguation. See [http://bugs.debian.org/310754 Debian #310754] for the problems caused by this. While you say "this sounds wrong", the primary use of labels has in fact always been to mount filesystems by label. If you want to save an automatically-generated description somewhere, I do not think that this is the best field to use. Is it really necessary to save the automatically-generated description? It seems likely that it would get less out of date if you simply generated it automatically each time you needed it, unless a label has been explicitly set. --ColinWatson | |
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* Modify gnome-vfs to display the /dev entry name if there is no label nor vendor information available * Add a method to hal to change a volume label (bug #68924) * Modify gnome-vfs and nautilus to use this method |
Please check the status of this specification in Launchpad before editing it. If it is Approved, contact the Assignee or another knowledgeable person before making changes.
Launchpad Entry: desktop-volumes-representation
Packages affected: gnome-vfs2, hal, ubiquity?
Summary
This specification is about providing a consistent and user friendly representation of the drives and volumes over the desktop
Release Note
The drives and volumes representation has been made consistent over the desktop and their naming has been simplified
Rationale
At the moment the drives and volumes are not represented in the same way over the desktop (computer location, fileselector, places menu) and the naming is confusing in some cases
Use Cases
- Martin has connected has several window partition mounted on his desktop, they have explicit name which make it easy for him to find the one where his music is stored
Design
Naming to use on the desktop:
- use the label if there is one available (also for unmounted partition)
- if there is no label use the hal vendor information
- if there is no vendor information appends the /dev device name
Volumes to hide:
- volumes that can't be browsed by the user (EPERM)
- volumes that are automounted at boot in a "standard known directory" (/home, /var, /usr, etc.)
add a layer in gvfs/gnome-vfs to hide some of the volumes => the user can click Remove in nautilus to hide the volume
When an user mount a volume without a label ask him for one
Look if ubiquity is setting label to partitions, if not teach it to do it
We deliberately stopped doing this, and I think it would be a really bad idea to start again. Labels are for the system administrator to set. If you try to set them automatically, then either you get conflicts between different operating systems installed on the same computer (this really happened - both Red Hat and Debian automatically labelled the root filesystem "/", which broke one or the other of them randomly), or you get silly autogenerated names with numbers on the end that look odd. Plus, there's no standard scheme for generating labels so we're almost certain to conflict with somebody else's scheme for doing the same kind of thing. I'd strongly suggest using labels if they exist, but otherwise doing something else that doesn't involve writing a string into the filesystem metadata. --ColinWatson
Would labels like "/ (Ubuntu)" avoid this problem? Also, do you have more details on why RH and Debian were broken by the automatic labels? Do they depend on labels to do some stuff (this sounds wrong)? -- VincentUntz
No, it wouldn't avoid the problem because multiple installations of Ubuntu on the same machine are not uncommon. There's a limit on label length (ext2 is limited to 16 characters, at least) so there's only so far we can take automatic disambiguation. See [http://bugs.debian.org/310754 Debian #310754] for the problems caused by this. While you say "this sounds wrong", the primary use of labels has in fact always been to mount filesystems by label. If you want to save an automatically-generated description somewhere, I do not think that this is the best field to use. Is it really necessary to save the automatically-generated description? It seems likely that it would get less out of date if you simply generated it automatically each time you needed it, unless a label has been explicitly set. --ColinWatson
Make partitions editor set label on partitions their create (gparted?)
Same issue as for the installer. --ColinWatson
Well, in gparted, there can be a small entry with the label name when creating the partition, and the user can change the automatically computed label before creating the partition. -- VincentUntz
True, though gparted is a pain to modify and I question whether this is worth it since we no longer use it by default. In any case, this would still not apply to automatic partitioning. --ColinWatson
Add way to change label easily (https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/nautilus/+bug/61966) (https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/nautilus/+bug/68924)
This, on the other hand, would be pretty good, since it's up to the system administrator. --ColinWatson
Implementation
- Modify gnome-vfs to display the /dev entry name if there is no label nor vendor information available
- Add a method to hal to change a volume label (bug #68924)
- Modify gnome-vfs and nautilus to use this method
Test/Demo Plan
DesktopVolumesRepresentation (last edited 2008-08-06 16:38:08 by localhost)