Reattach/redetect allways connected umass device - is it possible ?

[Peter Jeremy]

On Tue, 2005-Mar-29 10:16:05 +0200, Stijn Hoop wrote:
>From a desktop user experience point of view, it is rather nice to get
>a notification if and when removable media disappears, without
>continously polling said media.

There's no reason why the kernel couldn't regularly poll removable media
as long as it didn't interfere with normal operation of the device or
intrude upon the user (who remembers Amiga FDD's ticking?).

> This statement intentionally ignores
>the question of how to get such an event through the kernel to
>userspace.

I don't believe this is a problem.  For a command line interface, you
run "ls" and get a snapshot of the directory contents - you don't expect
the output from an old "ls" to magically update itself when a file is
deleted, you re-run "ls".  GUI file browsers are more of a problem but
as long as the browser doesn't cache the results from one invocation to
another, this wouldn't seem to be a problem.

In any case, the majority of the computer users seem quite happy with
a user interface that, upon ejecting a removable medium and inserting
a different medium, will happily display the union of the contents of
the old and new media.  It would take a seriously warped mind to
manage anything so non-intuitive so anything we achieve will be an
improvement over the status quo.

-- 
Peter Jeremy