#433835 nautilus: No documentation on which volumen devices icons are shown and which filtered

Package:
nautilus
Source:
nautilus
Description:
file manager and graphical shell for GNOME
Submitter:
Javier Fernández-Sanguino Peña
Date:
2014-08-08 22:27:04 UTC
Severity:
wishlist
#433835#5
Date:
2007-07-19 19:12:31 UTC
From:
To:
I have quite a convoluted disk partitioning scheme in my local system:

$ LC_ALL=C df -kl
Filesystem           1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda1               964500    422156    493348  47% /
tmpfs                   518068         0    518068   0% /lib/init/rw
udev                     10240        96     10144   1% /dev
tmpfs                   518068         4    518064   1% /dev/shm
/dev/hda3              1921188   1626568    197028  90% /var
/dev/hda5              4806904   3638308    924412  80% /usr
/dev/hda6             19228276   1977400  16274128  11% /usr2
/dev/sda1            307663800 185602844 106432524  64% /home
/dev/hdg1             38464340  34108420   2402016  94% /home/mirrors
/dev/hda7             49066116  45874256    699380  99% /home/mirrors/debian

For some reason, this Nautilus version does not represent all of the
available partitions as "devices" in the Desktop and in the "Places".
It currently only shows icons for the following locations:

/usr2
/home/mirrors
/home/mirrors/debian

Previous versions did show all the devices, including /usr, /var and /home.

I've been unable to find in Nautilus documentation what criteria does it use
to present volumes in the user's Desktop and how to adjust that criteria to
suit my needs.

Could this behaviour please be documented somewhere?

Regards

Javier

#433835#12
Date:
2007-08-10 15:35:53 UTC
From:
To:
I agree, this would be useful. I'm not very clear on where in the stack
this is configured, nautilus, gnome-volume-manager, or even hal? Maybe
someone in the pkg-gnome team can clarify this?

#433835#17
Date:
2007-08-25 21:28:45 UTC
From:
To:
reassign 433835 hal
thanks

After reading bug 415893, it seems this bug belongs to HAL.

Similar to the request in 415893, maybe a short explanation in
README.Debian about which volumes is shown could be appropriate?

#433835#24
Date:
2007-11-15 00:43:53 UTC
From:
To:
Debian Bug Tracking System schrieb:

I don't really think this bug belongs to hal.
It's rather nautilus/gnome-vfs2 which filters out certain mount points
(like e.g. /) and this list is, what the OP asked for.

Are you ok if the bug is reassigned to nautilus again?

Cheers,
Michael

#433835#31
Date:
2008-01-10 18:07:54 UTC
From:
To:
Le jeudi 19 juillet 2007 à 21:12 +0200, Javier Fernández-Sanguino Peña a
écrit :

The exclusion list is hardcoded in gnome-vfs and based on the FHS v2.3.

It could, but I’m not sure where to put it so that people interested in
it will find it.

#433835#36
Date:
2008-01-11 02:11:12 UTC
From:
To:
Do you mean this?

gnome-vfs-2.20.1/libgnomevfs/gnome-vfs-hal-mounts.c:

    628         const char *fhs23_toplevel_mount_points[] = {
    629                 "/",
    630                 "/bin",
    631                 "/boot",
    632                 "/dev",
    633                 "/etc",
    634                 "/home",
    635                 "/lib",
    636                 "/lib64",
    637                 "/media",
    638                 "/mnt",
    639                 "/opt",
    640                 "/root",
    641                 "/sbin",
    642                 "/srv",
    643                 "/tmp",
    644                 "/usr",
    645                 "/var",
    646                 "/proc",
    647                 "/sbin",
    648                 NULL
    649         };

The way it is implemented, the exclusion list fails to exclude
filesystems that are mounted under those that it hides (in my situation
/home/mirrors under /home, which is excluded). Is this a bug?

Maybe it should be changed (line 694):

   if (strcmp (mount_point, fhs23_toplevel_mount_points[i]) == 0)

to

   if (strncmp (mount_point, fhs23_toplevel_mount_points[i],
sizeof(fhs23_toplevel_mount_points[i])) == 0)

so that it would exclude both '/home/' and any filesystems mounted under
'/home'? This is just an example, it should be more elaborate since the
above code can lead to false positives as it would also exclude the
'/home_company' filesystem (which would not mounted underneath '/home'). It
wouldn't be too difficult to implement a patch for this feature (hide a
system volume and all volumes underneath it). Should I do it?

You say that Nautilus only blacklists from a hardcoded list but, actually,
reading that code I see it calls libhal_volume_should_ignore() to
explicitly ignore volumes. It seems that if a volume has the property
"volume.ignore" defined in HAL it is not presented. So it actually seems that
the sysadmin could adjust the configuration files under /etc/hal/fdi to
explicitly tell nautilus to ignore a volume.

After tinkering a bit I've found that I can drop a file to
/etc/hal/fdi/policy/ (I named it 'ignore.fdi') for HAL to parse:
------------------------------------------------------------------- <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <!-- -*- SGML -*- --> <deviceinfo version="0.2"> <device> <match key="block.is_volume" bool="true"> <match key="volume.fstype" string="ext3"> <merge key="volume.ignore" type="bool">true</merge> </match> </match> </device> </deviceinfo> ------------------------------------------------------------------- This file tells HAL to set the 'ignore' flag on any ext3 filesystems it find. This effectively solves my problem with Nautilus as all the volumes I don't want my users to see are ext3. I have confirmed through 'lshal' (which I just found about) and through nautilus that introducing this file and restarting hal is sufficient for my needs. However, as I've said before, it shouldn't be so difficult (a user shouldn't need to parse the code) to find this out. It should be written somewhere. It should be in Nautilus "Help" documentation (as the manpage is very brief). That's where I tried to look for it first. Other options would be GNOME's System Admistrators Guide, maybe under the 'lockdown' section. Since this is actually limiting what users "see" of the system underneath from their Desktops. Regards Javier
#433835#41
Date:
2008-01-11 09:04:10 UTC
From:
To:
Le vendredi 11 janvier 2008 à 03:11 +0100, Javier Fernández-Sanguino
Peña a écrit :

Yes.

It is intentional, but not optimal.

This is a good idea, but that needs better thought. Especially, volumes
under /media and /mnt must not be ignored.

The way I have dealt with it until now is to add commonly found
locations in 06_blacklist-directories.patch.

Yes, both blacklists add together.

Frankly I don’t think so. This is the user manual and should not talk
about such advanced settings.

That would be a better option indeed. As it is a translated manual, I
also think it should be done upstream.

#433835#46
Date:
2014-08-08 22:25:06 UTC
From:
To:
Hey Javier,

this is an old bug.

Could you please still reproduce this issue with newer nautilus version
like 3.4.2-1+build1 or 3.12.2-1 ?

thanks
regards
althaser