Re: Soft ejects

[Brian May <bam@debian.org>]

>>>>> "Fish" == Fish Smith <dyson_sphere_explorer@yahoo.com> writes:

    Fish> Unlike many others, I don't share the view that "linux needs
    Fish> to be made more newbie friendly."  Doing that will kill
    Fish> everything that made it great, and turn it into another
    Fish> Windoze.  I don't care if the entire world doesn't all use
    Fish> GNU systems, as long as I have them to get my work done.  If
    Fish> somebody doesn't understand, I will be helpful and try to
    Fish> explain, but if they don't want to tolerate a system with a
    Fish> learning curve then they don't have to use it, and probably
    Fish> don't deserve to.  Leave this domain to those of us who do
    Fish> care to learn.

It is not only newbies that can make stupid mistakes, and remove a
floppy disk that is currently mounted...

Perhaps the real problem with soft ejects is that current
implementations make it to easy to override, eg when the power is off.
Personally, I think I would much prefer the risk of not being able to
eject a disk, rather then the risk that someday I will accidently
currupt an important disk by ejecting it when it is still mounted.

These protection devices not need to turn you into a windows[1] user, I
think it is just plain common sense. Other protection mechanims
already exist in Linux, eg you can't eject a CDROM that is mounted (I
guess this protects programs from crashing that are currently using
it), you can't e2fsck a mounted filesystem, etc.

Note:

[1] Dos/windows copes with this problem in a different (IMHO broken)
way - it keeps track of which disk is inserted, and if it needs to
read/write to another disk, it complains to the user to reinsert the
original disk. Why is this mechanism broken? For starters: some games
will automatically eject a CD-ROM and ask you to insert the next
CD-ROM. For some reason, windows will often decide that it still
needed the original CD-ROM, and ask you to reinsert it!!! It even goes
as far as to suggest that the CD-ROM might be dirty. Now thats what I
call "machine is smarter"!!!

-- 
Brian May <bam@debian.org>