Today I needed to reorganize the partitions on a MicroSD card. I found that the best solution was GParted, so pulled that open to reformat the thing.
I needed to unmount its two partitions first (a FAT32 and an ext3). Okay... did that through GParted since the option was there. NOTHING Happened; Nautilus mounted the disk again "automatically". How nice of it. Unmounted through Nautilus. Now it /stayed/ unmounted. GParted got as far as deleting the partitions. Now, whenever it starts work on creating them, Nautilus decides to mount the disk again and GParted errors out. This can't be good for the partition table, and it is definitely not good for my head. Before, there was an option under Removable Drives and Media for "Mount removable drives when hot-plugged", which would have remedied this stupid problem (albeit in a user-hostile way). Nope, it isn't there any more because Nautilus has now taken over the role of mounting devices, as if drawing the desktop image, being a shell and managing files was not enough for it. In the bizarrely placed new Media tab under File Management Preferences, there is no such option. In short, I cannot find an obvious solution. Of course I can kill Nautilus, but I generally refuse to employ "geeky" solutions to these problems. GParted is a sort of a power-user tool, but this is a serious usability problem. Is there data that Nautilus should be paying attention to which says when a disk is OK to mount? How is Nautilus tracking new devices? It strikes me as totally bizarre that it will mount a device again just because it was not the program to unmount it. Actually, that behaviour seems the precise opposite of the Unix "do one thing well" philosophy since it conflicts with other applications doing anything reasonably related. (Although I suppose this isn't surprising given that file managers in general can't resist doing every file-related task under the sun). My thought is that this is a new bug in need of serious fixing before something bad happens. (Like someone relies on a deployed GNOME desktop running above a huge file server?). The reason I am not jumping at Bugzilla is because this could also do with some discussion. Is anyone else able to reproduce this? Is the current behaviour desirable in other cases? Bye, -Dylan
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