Dolphin: Grouped mount points for devices

Sat Oct 31, 2009 5:50 pm

This idea is for a UI that exposes actions applying to a device as a whole, as oppose to its individual mount point(s), whilst preserving per-item interaction, in a non-intrusive way.

It relates to the idea Hierarchical Places and more specifically the section about devices with multiple partitions/mount points. The reason for having it here as a separate idea is because, conceptually, it is not specific to having hierarchical trees in Places, which is only an implementation detail. Furthermore, the UI proposed here is fundamentally different.

Usage case: A device has multiple partitions, here 'Storage', 'Transport' and 'WDLinux'. These appear as usual in Places. However, hovering over any of the items, reveals a logical grouping, exposing a group action alongside the normal per-item actions (e.g. you can still click on each partition separately). The group action reveals an 'eject' and possibly other actions, such as 'info'. The 'eject' action performs a complete unmount of all partitions and power down of the device (if the device is a hard drive, that should cause the drive to spin down, the equivalent to 'hdparm -Y /device/path')

Reasoning: The current "Safely Remove" action only unmounts the selected partition. Dolphin does not provide an action to 'power-down' the device for 'true' safe-removal. The above idea provides a way to expose such an action with minimal clutter, alteration and side-effects to the existing UI.

Alternatives: An alternative to the above group-action UI, for powering down an external device, could be done when all mount points of the device have been unmounted. However, this can cause an involuntary power-down action, when for instance the user chooses to unmount one partition before mounting another. Other alternative is to include an 'eject' action to the right-click menu of each mount point. However, in this case, it's not obvious which other mount points belong to the same device.

Last edited by Ioannis on Wed Dec 02, 2009 12:49 pm, edited 5 times in total.

Ioannis Registered Member Posts 37 Karma 0 OS	Dolphin: Grouped mount points for devices Sat Oct 31, 2009 5:50 pm This idea is for a UI that exposes actions applying to a device as a whole, as oppose to its individual mount point(s), whilst preserving per-item interaction, in a non-intrusive way. It relates to the idea Hierarchical Places and more specifically the section about devices with multiple partitions/mount points. The reason for having it here as a separate idea is because, conceptually, it is not specific to having hierarchical trees in Places, which is only an implementation detail. Furthermore, the UI proposed here is fundamentally different. Usage case: A device has multiple partitions, here 'Storage', 'Transport' and 'WDLinux'. These appear as usual in Places. However, hovering over any of the items, reveals a logical grouping, exposing a group action alongside the normal per-item actions (e.g. you can still click on each partition separately). The group action reveals an 'eject' and possibly other actions, such as 'info'. The 'eject' action performs a complete unmount of all partitions and power down of the device (if the device is a hard drive, that should cause the drive to spin down, the equivalent to 'hdparm -Y /device/path') Reasoning: The current "Safely Remove" action only unmounts the selected partition. Dolphin does not provide an action to 'power-down' the device for 'true' safe-removal. The above idea provides a way to expose such an action with minimal clutter, alteration and side-effects to the existing UI. Alternatives: An alternative to the above group-action UI, for powering down an external device, could be done when all mount points of the device have been unmounted. However, this can cause an involuntary power-down action, when for instance the user chooses to unmount one partition before mounting another. Other alternative is to include an 'eject' action to the right-click menu of each mount point. However, in this case, it's not obvious which other mount points belong to the same device. Last edited by Ioannis on Wed Dec 02, 2009 12:49 pm, edited 5 times in total.
Ioannis Registered Member Posts 37 Karma 0 OS	Dolphin: Grouped mount points for devices Tue Nov 03, 2009 11:11 pm I was looking at the implementation side of things. I think it's better to add this to the KFilePlacesView class (part of KDE libraries). This way it would expose it to anything that has a 'Places' panel/dock. Any input from KDE developers?
peterR Registered Member Posts 4 Karma 0 OS	Dolphin: Grouped mount points for devices Wed Dec 02, 2009 12:34 pm Nice idea - could also go (or be shown too) on device notifier so you can remove media as a block from there as well. This is a real issue with things like usb hard drives which often have more than one partition and can not be shut down safely. so far the best I have found in Kubuntu Karmic is to pinch palimpsest from gnome but really not ideal at all.