I totally agree with this issue in fact being a bug. Why? ------ Nautilus provides a GUI in order to take things like save mounting/unmounting to preserve filesystem integrity down from system administrator level to everyday user level. I am a system administrator for 70 linux desktop, amongst other things, but a lot of people are defecting to Apple over issues like these. OS X _does_ give helpful information about which process is blocking umount, even if the process is running in a shell.
Outline how to solve: ------------------------- Using information from `lsof´ you can figure out which process is blocking the umount. Furthermore the PID can be used to identify the window or terminal (even text console) that belongs to it. DBUS can then be used to signal the window manager to bring the offending windows to the foreground. Signals can then be sent the programs to initiate the `save files´ dialog. In the case of text consoles or terminal windows the GUI can present a dialog to close the programs running from those shells or close the shells themselves. This is a solvable problem in most common cases, and actually I think quite straightforward. It just needs some scripts parsing lsof, some interaction between filemanager, windowmanager and dbus, and a bit of heuristics to cover the most common cases. This is a low hanging fruit in terms of improving the user experience. Whose responsibility? -------------------------- Enabling the average clueless user to unmount usb sticks is core functionality in a desktop OS. Since Canonical aims to offer an easy to use Linux distro, primarily based on Gnome, I think that this _core functionality_ should be provided by Canonical. Since Canonical is hiring people to work on kernel, X and Gnome/KDE, I certainly feel that you cannot simply say this is an upstream issue. Upstream has different priorities. Since this is probably a relatively easy thing to solve, no major new subsystem needs to be invented, just using existing subsystems and programs like `lsof´, I think Canonical should get involved with upstream to fix this once and for all. -- When nautilus cannot unmount a media, it must tell why. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/19586 You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is a direct subscriber. -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
