GNOME Volume Manager Sub-Optimal! (was: Re: Sound Juicer Sub-optimal?)

Jeffrey Stedfast writes:

Ross Burton writes:
> > So. Someone puts in a CD. A while later, although there’s no
> > indication something is happening, sound-juicer pops up.
>
> This is a bug in gnome-volume-manager: it doesn’t give you any feedback
> that it is probing the new media, or starting Sound Juicer. I think a notification
> area icon for “new media inserted” would be good whilst it probes, and then
> the standard startup notification animation/panel entry when it starts up
> Sound Juicer.

This is actually completely false. No probing of audio CDs is ever done by g-v-m – any probing done on the device is done by the kernel/HAL/somewhere-lower-in-the-stack and so not only is the fault not with g-v-m for this delay, but g-v-m also cannot possibly report any notifications/progress/whatever.

I think Ross does not refer to the fact that probing a device takes time, but exclusively to the fact that gnome-volume-manager does not use startup notification. It simply executes /desktop/gnome/volume_manager/autoplay_cda_command.

IMHO, we should rather use a special key in .desktop files specifying that a particular application handles a particular media type (i.e. VolumeManagerBlankCDExec=foo %s, VolumeManagerDVDExec=bar %s, etc.). If we add gnome_desktop_item_launch_full to the GNOMEDesktopItem API, allowing the client application to specify another key than “Exec”, we’ll be able to pick up all applications with such a key and let GNOME Desktop ensure that the “StartupNotify” key is evaluated.

This would also resolve the following usability rant. I’ve felt exactly the same when seeing the dialog for the first time, btw.:

I realize that providing a drop-down list of known applications would only throw a very small light on what the system usually offers. However, the average desktop user neither knows about commandline parameters nor even about the names of all the applications he uses because the GNOME naming schema (in menus and so forth) differs from the real application names (they’re not localized, for example).

I think somebody already came up with a similar proposal, at least I remember seeing a mockup.