Drive Mount Applet

I started to look at bringing the drive mount applet from gnome-applts up to scratch, since it hasn't really had much work done on it other than porting to the 2.x development platform.

The applet is a classic example of Gnome 1.x user interface complexity. The applet shows a button that can be clicked to mount or unmount a particular mount point. For this simple functionality, it provides the following preferences:

  • The mount directory
  • The interval at which to check the mounted state
  • Which of a set of custom images to use to show the mounted state (eg. floppy drive, cdrom drive, etc).
  • The ability to specify custom mounted/unmounted images.
  • Whether to eject the disk after unmounting.
  • Whether to use a second method for checking the mounted state which might work better with automounters.

The applet also had a few problems, such as not being able to unmount a disk if there was a trash directory on it (since fam would have a dnotify watch active on that directory).

By using some of the newer gnome-vfs APIs, I think it should be possible to remove all the preferences:

  1. The GnomeVFSVolumeManager API can be used to get a list of attached drives and volumes, and receive notification when volumes are mounted or new drives are connected or disconnected. This allows one applet to display the status of all user (un)mountable drives/volumes in one applet.
  2. By using the gnome-vfs APIs to unmount or eject a volume, a volume_pre_unmount signal to interested applications before attempting to unmount it. When Nautilus receives this signal, it drops its FAM watches on the trash directory for that volume, and closes all associated windows. This means that Nautilus/FAM won't cause a "volume is busy" error (although some other apps might hold files opne on the volume).
  3. The gnome-vfs APIs tell us what the volume type is. This way we can automatically do an unmount+eject for cdrom, zip and jaz drives like Nautilus does rather than having to provide a preference.
  4. Gnome-vfs also tells us what icon name should be used for a particular drive or volume. This way the applet can just pull the icons from the current icon theme rather than having to maintain separate ones.

My code is at the point where it produces nice screenshots, and has the above features. The screenshot shows it as a separate window, but adding the applet wrapper stuff isn't too difficult (it is easier to test as a standalone app). It is less than half the size of the old applet too, which is promising.