Re: How to fix CDROM/DVD eject mess?

From: Maciej W. Rozycki
Date: Mon Feb 02 2015 - 14:34:45 EST


On Mon, 2 Feb 2015, Kay Sievers wrote:

> > I thought that fixing the udev behavior would solve the problem. But
> > it turned out that I was too naive. A bigger problem is that all
> > user-space stuff misinterprets DISK_EVENT_EJECT_REQUEST event: they
> > see this as if the disk is *ready* to be ejected. KDE, for example,
> > dismisses the DVD icon when it receives this event even if it's still
> > mounted.
>
> It is not really about being "ready to eject", if the user presses the
> button, the user does not want to wait for anything else than actually
> ejecting the media as fast as possible. It is the same as ripping out
> a USB cable. It needs to work, no matter if things are mounted or
> busy.

All the technical details aside, this is a bold statement -- how do you
know what the user actually wants?

I for one want to see the medium locked if in use, just as it has been
since 1990s. If I wanted to do an emergency eject (the equivalent of
ripping out a USB cable), then I would use a paperclip in the manual eject
hole. So you've got a counterexample to your assertion now. All people
are not the same.

All I want to say here is there seems to be a policy hidden somewhere
here where it should not. It's up to the user to decide what suits him or
her. We just need to give them the right tools.

> It is just a hardware button event which should not be masked out for
> rather weird reasons.

Precisely, and I should have a way to control it. If I used a GUI, I
might want the event to pop up a window with the list of current users
(accessing processes) of the device, perhaps asking if to terminate them.
Or flip a relay to make my kettle boil water.

FWIW,

Maciej
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