I encountered a horrible experience with Nautilus and GParted

[Phillip Susi]

Peteris Krisjanis wrote:
> Even better, hal just needs to know which devices are actually
> formatted atm, and spread this info to other apps so they don't try to
> access this device.

I think it needs to take place at a lower level than hal; either in the 
kernel or udevd.  The partitioners need some way of telling the rest of 
the system that the device is not yet ready, and that begins with the 
kernel announcing the new device to udevd.  Maybe partitioner like tools 
need to place a lock on the underlying disk device to make sure they 
have exclusive access to manipulate the partition table, and the kernel 
should not announce the new information until the tool releases the 
lock, when it is completely finished.