When inserting an Ubuntu CD on Ubuntu...

[James Westby]

...what should happen?

Currently mpt says that this opens two things, nautilus, and a
special dialog that offers to open the package manager. Obviously
this is not great.

Nautilus has an "x-content" bar that can deal with things like this.
Plug in a memory card full of photos, or open the trash, and you will
see it as a yellow bar under the location bar, with a button to
launch an app to handle it. (Similar to some of firefox's 
notifications).

It would be possible to make this happen for Ubuntu CDs. This would
mean when you inserted it nautilus would open, and show you the contents
of the CD, and have the bar offering to start whatever would handle
the CD.

For this to happen the shared-mime-info spec should be extended to
detect and report a "deb CD" or similar. Nautilus can then add this
to its list of special cases. The app that would open adds a line to
its desktop file (or a new desktop file with No-Display as appropriate).

There are however a couple of open questions.

  * Is showing the contents of the CD the right thing, should nautilus
    just learn not to open for these CDs and we keep the current dialog?
  * Should this be a "deb CD", a "package CD", an "Ubuntu CD", or even
    flavour specific? Having a "package CD" would mean that this would
    trigger on Ubuntu if you inserted an OpenSUSE cd. Having a "deb CD"
    would mean it would trigger if you insert a Debian CD. Flavour
    specific seems a bit much though, the application that launched    
    could deal with differing flavours.

This certainly seems like something that could be solved for Karmic 
without too much work as it seems to be mainly shuffling existing pieces
around.

Thanks,

James