[Bug 42017] Re: disk-mount applet produces additional, confusing icons for fstab entries

[Christof Krüger]

The problem is that the USB entries entries are marked as user_visible
by gnome-vfs. When booting with the usb drive not connected, gnome-vfs
lists the drive without any mounted volumes. The entry has no hal udi
and the device_path is the same that is listed in /etc/fstab.
Additionally, activation_uri is set to the mount point set in fstab. In
my case it is a /dev/usb200gig and /media/200gig.

Now when you plug in the USB drive, udev creates a dev file, let us say
/dev/sda1. Because of the custom udev-rule, a symlink to /dev/sda1 is
created. In this example /dev/usb200gig is now pointing to /dev/sda1.

Gnome-vfs now lists an _additional_ drive entry with an hal udi and
device_path being /dev/sda1.

The diskmount applet displays all "user_visible" drives, so now there is
one button for the /dev/usb200gig (which has no volumes mounted, because
gnome-vfs ignores it) and one button for "/dev/sda1" which can have a
volume entries when it is actually mounted.

A workaround for this is to 'killall gnome-vfs-daemon' from console. It
will respawn immediately and only list the one device from there on.
This entry has an hal udi, actuvation uri, the device path is /dev/sda1.
Looks like gnome-vfs follows the symlink now. It couln't follow it back
then because it didn't exist the last time gnome-vfs checked. And here
lies the problem: It doesn't check often enough. When a new device is
being attached, gnome-vfs should check if one of the already present
devices is available now and if it is actually the same one.

The fact that the device list is _not_ invariant (it's different, after
restarting gnome-vfs) shows that this is actually a bug.

-- 
disk-mount applet produces additional, confusing icons for fstab entries
https://launchpad.net/bugs/42017