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Really stupid bug - K3B vs MCC


ffrr
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<small rant>

This is brilliant, I was using K3B and while it was working, I opened Mandrake control centre and tried to install some software. The damn thing opened up the DVD burner drawer that K3B was using !!!! No error, no warning, nothing....

 

Why does linux have so much trouble with removable media? Why can't it be consistent in how in handles the issues, like if it is mounted, or not, or in use, but not mounted, or just plain busy. Why can't it eject a CD when you ask, but then at other times, eject it when it wasn't asked, and when it plainly shouldn't (see above)?

 

Why can't it recognise and use a USB memory key reliably as the same device name each time(see one of my other posts)?

 

Why can't it upgrade software and leave the settings alone (xorg turning off graphical login during upgrade).

 

Why the hell did it 'upgrade' my 1.0.3 Firefox install to 1.0.2 ???

 

Gee, this is version 2005, and still it's full of silly bugs

</small rant>

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The answer to this question is far more complex than you might expect.

 

First, in terms of commercial software like winodws and PC games, there is always pressure from the publishing companies to get the product out the door.

 

Mandrake has the same problems. At one end of the comapny, you have honest hard working programmers, who want nothing more than to make the best distro in the world while paying their rent. And at the other end of the company, and this is true of ALL such venturs, you have people who's sole, short-sighted concern, is getting the next release out the door, to keep money coming in to start work on the next release which they will try to rush out the door to get money coming in for the next release and so on. This battle never ends, and usualy, it's the programers, and not the corporations who take the heat. For example, google "vivendi closes Dynamix"

 

As for the specific issue of the handleing of CD's, it is because we are in a transitional period of the handleing of removeble media. At first, when linux first became able to handle removable media, it was simple, efficient and reliable, but a pain in the ass. You mounted everything manualy, and unmounted it manualy. Only root could mount or unmount, and life was simple, if a litle annoying.

 

Various distros tried to address the issue, and the first idea that stuck at all was supermount. The idea with supernount, is that it always thinks there's a disk mounted, but that doesn't stop you from removing the disk. For some folks this worked well. For me it was just like winodws (one of the true high points of the Windows line of OS's) almost 95% of the time. But it was problematic, and despite the best efforts of thousands of programmers, nobody ever figured out how to make supermount work properly for everyone.

 

With mandrake 10.0 and above, we have a program that replaces supermount called MagicDev. It automaticaly mounts things, and it 'really' mounts them, so there is a lock file on the device. MCC will still probably still bung your CD burn as it's always run as root, and the root user couldn't give a flying f about lock files, but the easiest way to fix that, is to put the CD burner as the secondary drive if you have 2 CDrom drives, and mandy will just ask for the other one.

 

Also, if you have trouble with your usb key or card reader or external hotpluggable zip drive, I highly reccomend installing the latest version if you haven't yet. Mandriva Linux Limited Edition 2005 has the best handling of removable media I have personaly ever seen on any linux distro.

 

It's the only one that has instantly reccognized and mounted my hipzip mp3 player, and it allows me to hotplug cards into and out of my card reader, where before, I had to put them in the reader, then plug the reader in. This means I can now use one of those readers that sits in the front of your case like a floppy drive.

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I highly reccomend installing the latest version if you haven't yet.  Mandriva Linux Limited Edition 2005 has the best handling of removable media I have personaly ever seen on any linux distro.

 

Thank you very much for the long a thoughtful reply. I have just upgraded to 2005LE, and yes, it seems better than 10.1 even, however the MCC vs K3B, and the MP3 USB drive and upgrade problems all occurred under this latest version.

 

However, I appreciate what you say about pressures to get a release 'out there'. I just hope they fix up these things with some updates.

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All I can say is that with any luck, you may find a solution. The upgrade problem simply caused by installing non-mandrake rpms. It sucks, but that's life.

 

If you are running hotplug, you might try dissabling it. I found that hotplug and magicdev don't get along unless you do some serious editing of the hotplug scripts to make them ignore all the stuff that magicdev handles. Why mandrake doesn't do this for us, I may never know. I can only guess that it's because they haven't used it for long, and assume some people may not want to.

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I'm a little confused. Would you rather have MCC (rpmdrake) tell you:

"You have a disk in the drive. Please unmount and/or remove the disk."

every time you tried to run it or would you rather have it muck up your CD burn when you make the mistake of trying to install software that is only on removable disk sources while you are burning a disk?

 

The reason I don't give an answer is because every time I try to think of a solution, I reach the conclusion that it is hard to say which is the lesser of the two evils. Personally, I would never try to install software while in the process of burning a cd/dvd...even if my urpmi sources were pure web sources, the cpuload of burning and installing at the same time would surely risk toasting my disk.

Edited by Steve Scrimpshire
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This is brilliant, I was using K3B and while it was working, I opened Mandrake control centre and tried to install some software.  The damn thing opened up the DVD burner drawer that K3B was using !!!!  No error, no warning, nothing....

 

Why does linux have so much trouble with removable media?  Why can't it be consistent in how in handles the issues, like if it is mounted, or not, or in use, but not mounted, or just plain busy.  Why can't it eject a CD when you ask, but then at other times, eject it when it wasn't asked, and when it plainly shouldn't (see above)?

I'd hate to say this my friend, but it was your fault. You should be aware that you're currently using the drive. You should also be aware that when installing new software, you will need to insert cd's into the drive to get the software packages from. If you have two drives, you should know which one it is configured to read this information off of. This could have been avoided had you simply taken them time to understand what you were doing. I know you're not going to like hearing that, but it's the truth. Be more aware of what you're doing and how the system will react to your actions.

 

As far as the xorg problem - settings change during upgrades, and sometimes it is unsafe for it to keep the old settings. It should, however, be able to inform you that you may need to run xfdrake or what not to correct any settings changes.

 

As for firefox - if the 1.0.3 install -was not- installed via rpm then it was not registered with the software installer. This problem should be fixed one way or another.

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I'm a little confused. Would you rather have MCC (rpmdrake) tell you:

"You have a disk in the drive. Please unmount and/or remove the disk."

every time you tried to run it or would you rather have it muck up your CD burn when you make the mistake of trying to install software that is only on removable disk sources while you are burning a disk?

 

The reason I don't give an answer is because every time I try to think of a solution, I reach the conclusion that it is hard to say which is the lesser of the two evils. Personally, I would never try to install software while in the process of burning a cd/dvd...even if my urpmi sources were pure web sources, the cpuload of burning and installing at the same time would surely risk toasting my disk.

 

 

The solution is for it to realise that the drive is in use, and then, and only then, pop a message asking you to unmount the disk.

 

btw: CD burning on modern fast machines, is so stable these days that I regularly do all sorts of things - but in this case, K3B was only reading an audio disc to copy it, so it didn't cost me a disk, just some time and annoyance.

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I'd hate to say this my friend, but it was your fault.  You should be aware that you're currently using the drive. 

 

 

Well I guess we will have to disagree. MCC and/or linux, should handle device contention properly. When installing software, you don't know whether it will want the disc, or whether it will get it from a web site, and so it should warn you if the resource it needs is busy....

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I agree with ffrr, If the cdrom is in use it should atleast give you some kind of warning. I wouldn't blame the end user for something that a programmer should've caught.. I mean do they really think that rpmdrake is the only program that uses the Cdrom? to be fair i know that a programmer can't catch everything. But there was 3 beta versions of Le 2005 and no one caught it? or did they think it wasn't a bug. Ahh who knows maybe they get it work out in Mandriva 2006 :)

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I'm really not sure what's going on there, it should certainly be technically possible for k3b to lock the drive while it's burning - I can only imagine it's a bug in k3b that it doesn't. It shouldn't be rpmdrake's responsibility to check whether the drive is in use before trying to open it - that would be ass-backwards and there's no real good way to do it. k3b should lock it, and I'm fairly sure it could if it chose to.

 

And yes, it appears it did go through several beta versions and no-one caught it. Or if someone can provide me a bug number on qa.mandriva.com, go ahead. It's not something it'd naturally occur to me to test, either - though of course more rigorous testing methodologies would help there (and we are developing them, slowly).

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I'm really not sure what's going on there, it should certainly be technically possible for k3b to lock the drive while it's burning - 

 

 

To clarify, I had asked K3B to copy an audio CD, and it was in the process of reading the source when MCC interrupted it.

 

I agree that K3B should have locked it somehow (if some underlying linux process isn't responsible for handling device contention) as it is K3B's responsibility to ensure a good result - as much as it can.

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ffrr: apologies for my post, i was irritable last night (i also have a tendency to not respond so kindly to rants). you are right, k3b should lock the drive.

Edited by tymark
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